#proto-semitic — Public Fediverse posts

Some talks from EABS and NACAL

Today’s deal: 2-for-1 on conference reports.

European Association for Biblical Studies Annual Conference, 20-23 July 2026, Leuven

This was my first time visiting this conference, prompted by co-chairing (with Nili Samet) the new research unit Biblical Hebrew Language and Linguistics. This research unit will return for next year’s EABS in London (CfP to go public by the end of October). For those who are already interested in submitting an abstract:

The Biblical Hebrew Language and Linguistics research unit invites submissions for the 2027 London meeting in two areas:

1. An open session (or several open sessions) exploring Biblical Hebrew, broadly defined, from both traditional and innovative research perspectives. This includes various methodologies such as classical philology, linguistic analyses informed by both established and up-and-coming linguistic theories, emerging digital research methods, and others.
2. A special session focused on non-Tiberian traditions of Biblical Hebrew, whether attested in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, or the Modern period.

For all sessions, we especially encourage young researchers to present their work in progress or recent findings and are open to dedicated panels on the topic of ongoing research projects within the field of Biblical Hebrew. Abstracts should clearly state the presentation’s research question, (anticipated) conclusion, and relevance.

Revisiting Leuven for this year’s edition was a lot of fun and I think our first BHLL sessions went very well. At some point after getting back, however, I lost the little notebook I brought to the talks. So here are some vague recollections, going by the programme.

Kristin Weingart (LMU Munich) talked about the sources for royal reigns mentioned in Kings and Chronicles. She plausibly distinguished between “real, reconstructed, and imagined sources”. The book of Kings’ “Chronicles of the Kings of Israel/Judah” etc. probably refers to historically real documents. The “Book of the Acts of Solomon” (1 Kgs 11:41), however, stands out and was probably made up or inferred by a later writer as the source behind the data on Solomon’s reign. The biblical book of Chronicles, in turn, cites all kinds of sources like “the miḏrāš of the Prophet Iddo” that are probably not real and may have been motivated by the Greek tradition of sources-based historiography. I actually wonder whether this use of miḏrāš (from d-r-š ‘to seek, investigate’) is a calque of Greek ἱστορία.

Na’ama Pat-El (UT Austin) elaborated on her idea that the *-t- in some BH weak verb infinitives is historically unrelated to the feminine suffix. Historically I’m not sure, but she presents very compelling evidence that at least synchronically it’s not a feminine marker.

Tania Notarius (University of the Free State/Polis Institute) argued that the Ugaritic function of ṯʿy-priest, held by the most important scribe of the preserved Ugaritic corpus (Ilimilku), was related to the cult of the rpu͗m (Rephaim).

Svenja Lueg (VU Amsterdam), who unfortunately couldn’t make it in person, talked about differential object marking with ditransitive verbs, an underexplored part of BH syntax.

Geoffrey Khan (University of Cambridge) presented on the question of narrative yiqṭol and weqaṭal in BH.

Raanan Eichler (Bar-Ilan University), also online, showed that the ləḇīḇōṯ that Amnon had Tamar prepare him probably derive their name from lēḇ in the sense of ‘(female) chest’ and were most likely intended as suggestively breast-shaped dumplings.

The last morning saw our special session on new advances in linguistic periodization of BH:

Aaron Hornkohl (University of Cambridge) continued the debate over the validity of linguistic periodization, especially (if I recall correctly) in light of his own recent work.

I presented a case study of a method developed by Chiara Bozzone to employ Homeric formulas for dating purposes and whether it can be applied to BH, using the example of a certain formula in the Holiness Code (H) and (arguably) post-H texts.

John Screnock (University of Oxford) highlighted some statistical arguments against the periodization model that emerge from a full consideration of the data.

Natascha Grabowsky (Technical University Dortmund) examined the distribution of different year-dating formulas and the possible implications for the dating of the relevant texts.

Harald Samuel (University of Tübingen), also on the sceptical side, noted some changes that don’t behave neatly and ways in which the complicated history of redaction and vocalization plays tricks on us.

Finally, Nili Samet (Bar-Ilan University) presented some of the same kind of complex changes and, among other things, introduced what I think she called the Late Spelling Paradox: increasing plene spelling in Late Biblical Hebrew sometimes disambiguates archaic forms that could be plastered over by the reading tradition in earlier texts where they were spelled defectively. As a result, sometimes archaic features seem to increase in frequency in late texts, if you identify them based on the vocalized Masoretic Text.

And beyond our research unit, I enjoyed the last talk of the conference (one of several in parallel) by Innocent Himbaza (University of Fribourg), who suggested that Psalm 37 is half early and half late, with late additions alternating with parts of the early base text.

49th North Atlantic Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics, 30 September-2 October 2026, Paris

Probably my favourite conference, which I hadn’t attended since covid, in one of my favourite cities, let’s gooo

Lots and lots of interesting talks and conversations here, but for the sake of brevity I’m just going to mention the ones I took notes on and my own.

The talks were off to a strong start with Simon Korneev‘s (University of Cambridge) argument for epiglottal, rather than pharyngeal consonants in Semitic. This can explain the vowel fronting effects they cause in various languages and traditions. Handy rule of thumb for identification in the field: “If it sounds like Louis Armstrong, it’s probably epiglottal.”

Maarten Kossmann (Leiden University) compared the consonantal phonemes of two corpora of Eastern Libyco-Berber inscriptions to his reconstruction of Proto-Berber (Proto-Amazigh) and found that the represented LB is neither an ancestor nor a descendant of Proto-Berber, but likely a sister language. We miiight be able to make it ancestral to PB if we assume they didn’t write glottal stops (realized as creaky voice or some other suprasegmental feature on the vowel?).

Lior Laks, also presenting on behalf of Maha Nassar (both Bar-Ilan University) presented their research into Western European (especially English) loanwords into Palestinian Arabic as seen online and tried to explain why you sometimes get doublets like kōran vs. tkōran ‘to get covid’. The availability and productivity of periphrastic alternatives (e.g. axad dūš ‘to take a shower’ competing with tdawwaš) plays a large part in explaining how loanwords are adapted.

Matthew Morgenstern (Tel Aviv University) presented a talk he had wanted to give at our DOT workshop on Semitic reading traditions, speaking on Mandaic. Looking at spelling, it’s important to note that published Mandaic texts are almost all from manuscripts that postdate the 16th century CE. The earlier (5th-7th c. CE), magical texts often show more conservative from an Aramaic perspective, defective spelling. But interestingly, what is now identified as the ancestor of the Mandaic script, that of Elymaean Aramaic (early 2nd-early 3rd c. CE), already has widespread plene spellings of word-internal long a. So this was not a Mandaic innovation. In other ways, the Mandean tradition, which never developed a full vocalization system, largely relied on oral transmission of how to pronounce the texts. Only after the disastrous cholera epidemic of 1831 was this partially supported by Arabic transcriptions.

Mila Neishtadt (recently Tel Aviv University) very deftly combined two earlier ideas and lots of data on the representation of Aramaic š as either š or s in Arabic place names. In a nutshell, earlier borrowing gives s (as expected) and later borrowing gives š, with the geographic distribution (mostly š in Lebanon and the Galilee) resulting from mountain villages sticking to Aramaic for longer.

Julien Dufour (École normale supérieure) presented some very compelling but hard to interpret evidence that Modern South Arabian derived verbs used to have a voiceless consonant prefix wherever Arabic and Akkadian have u prefix vowels, notably in the D-stem as well as the C-stem. Dufour suggests these are ultimately all the same prefix, but that the one on the D-stem (and some other places) was already partially lenited in Proto-Semitic. Full, detailed handout presumably forthcoming on his Academia page.

I presented my ongoing work on reconstructing the North Semitic letter names as part of our alphabet project. Lots of great feedback on traditions I had missed and questionable steps in my argumentation.

Ahmad Al-Jallad (Ohio State University) and Alessia Prioletta (CNRS) argued that the Ge’ez script does not descend from Ancient South Arabian but is just one member of the larger South Semitic script family, closer in some ways to various Ancient North Arabian varieties (which just means everything apart from Ancient South Arabian). Only took them two slides to flip me from very sceptical to fully convinced. (Ahmad is giving a related talk in Leiden in two weeks, details upon request.)

Enam al-Wer‘s (University of Essex) keynote address gave an overview of the sociolinguistic research into Arabic conducted by her and her students over the past decades. One interesting coincidence that stood out to me is that the border between what they call Horani and Mu’abi dialects in Jordan pretty much aligns with the Moabite border before Mesha’s revolt, which was not the Arnon. I don’t think there’s a direct historical connection, but I wonder what in the landscape there makes Wadi al-Hedan (pronunciation corrected by Prof. al-Wer) a more natural border than Wadi Mujib.

Hugo Cartwright (independent researcher) kindly provided a talk to fill a gap in the program, presenting his computational research on alphabetic orders in abjads. You can check out his work at www.abjads.org.

Maarten Mous (Leiden University) and five not physically present co-authors presented a big finding from the Cushitic realm. The Mbugu people of Tanzania speak both “Normal Mbugu”, a not very exciting Bantu language, and “Inner Mbugu”, which has large-scale lexical replacement and is often cited as a mixed language. Mous et al. now find that the most archaic layer of the Inner Mbugu lexicon is closely related to Dahalo, the phonologically very exotic (East? South? Narrow?) Cushitic language spoken by a hunter-gatherer group in Kenya. They posit that a now extinct “Old Dahaloan” language, spoken by pastoralists, provided both the core Inner Mbugu lexicon and the target of shift for the ancestors of the present-day Dahalo, who quite probably originally spoke some other language.

Finally, Massinissa Garaoun (CNRS) presented an in-depth investigation of the toponymy of the Canary Islands. By connecting features in the landscape to Amazigh words for body parts, he was able to show to the full satisfaction of those audience members who know what they are talking about that they are etymologically Amazigh (Berber), not para-Berber or something else.

Greatly enjoyable as both of these conferences were, they will also remain linked in my memory to the passing of three individuals. Hector Patmore, one of the organisers of the Leuven EABS meeting, tragically and suddenly passed away on 13 September 2026; see In Memoriams here. Harry Stroomer, Leiden University professor emeritus of Afro-Asiatic languages and cultures, died on 19 July 2026 (In Memoriam here); NACAL opened with a presentation in his memory by Marijn van Putten (Leiden University). Furthermore, Marijn’s own talk (on the apparently irregular preservation of a verbal noun prefix in Berber) was based in part on comments made by, and formally co-presented with, brilliant NACAL-goer Adam Strich (Harvard University), who died on 10 January 2019. זֵכֶר צַדִּיק לִבְרָכָה (Proverbs 10:7).

People, pots, and Proto-(Northwest-)Semitic

A nice discussion with Marwan Kilani about the recently sequenced genome of a man from Old Kingdom Egypt this morning got me thinking about some connections between historical linguistics, archeology, and genetics that might be good to write down. I’m very much not at home in these last two fields, so everything that follows is at once highly speculative and probably very unoriginal. But especially the last part, about Northwest Semitic, is something I don’t think I’ve run into elsewhere.

A major finding from genetic research is that the Late Bronze/Iron Age populations of the Southern Levant, a likely location for the point of dispersal of Proto-Semitic, only partially continue the local Neolithic population. Apart from this Neolithic Levantine ancestry, there were two waves of admixture from the northeast of the Fertile Crescent or just beyond, from the genetically rather similar populations of the Caucasus or Zagros regions.1 Like so:

The timing of these admixture events works out so that it may have been these mixed populations that developed and spread both Proto-Semitic and Proto-Northwest-Semitic. Let’s look at this in three stages.

Before the admixture: Natufians, Proto-Afroasiatic?

The Neolithic, or rather Epipaleolithic Levantines mentioned above are commonly linked to the archeological culture of the Natufians.

Genetically, there seems to have been a lot of back-and-forth between the Levant and North Africa by this time already. Natufian-related ancestry has been detected in ancient human remains from Morocco, but indigenous North African ancestry is conversely also part of the Natufian genetic profile. Moreover, Natufian-related ancestry is also typical of Afroasiatic-speaking populations in East Africa, where it is mixed with indigenous East African ancestry. So it seems very possible that the Natufians played some role in the spread of Afroasiatic, whether they got it through their contacts with North Africa or spread it across the whole Afroasiatic-speaking area from the Levant.

First admixture: Early Bronze Age, Proto-Semitic?

As I’ve mentioned before, the dating of Proto-Semitic seems to align with the beginning of the Bronze Age. This is also when we have our first major influx of Caucasus/Zagros DNA. Interestingly, one of the Y-chromosomal haplogroups that is today associated with Semitic language speakers probably originated in the Caucasus.

So, does Semitic come from the Caucasus? Probably not (although you never know). It seems more likely that men carrying this J1 haplogroup were among the Caucasian immigrants to the Levant and mixed into the population, which ended up speaking Proto-Semitic, a continuation of the Afroasiatic that was already there.2 As Proto-Semitic spread, so did the Y-chromosomes of its male speakers, and J1 came along for the ride, together with more indigenous haplogroups like E-M34.

The Southern Levant was a bit slow in adopting the whole Bronze Age thing. I like to think that Proto-Semitic split up because the Proto-“East”-Semitic3 speakers moved north and participated in the urbanization of Syria and Mesopotamia, while Proto-“West”-Semitic stayed put. After the ancestors of Abyssinian, Modern South Arabian, Ancient South Arabian, and Arabic had spread out, that left some Proto-Central-Semitic speakers in place for the:

Second admixture: Intermediate Bronze Age, Proto-Northwest-Semitic?

Towards the end of the Early Bronze Age, something really interesting happens in the Southern Levant: representatives of the South Caucasian Kura-Araxes Culture show up and stay distinct from the local Levantines for a while. Then, during the under-appreciated Early Bronze Age Collapse or Intermediate Bronze Age (late third millennium BCE), they do end up merging into the local population. It seems likely that it was these immigrants who brought the second wave of Caucasus admixture, which is dated around this time. The affected populations are the ones that end up speaking Northwest Semitic, which first appears in writing as Amorite not too long afterwards.

Proto-Northwest-Semitic as a contact language?

Something I have wondered about for a long time is why Northwest-Semitic, otherwise very close to Proto-Central-Semitic, almost entirely lacks broken plurals. Normally, they seem to be pretty stable. The other branches where they have disappeared are Akkadian, which was in contact with Sumerian, and South Abyssinian, which was in heavy contact with various kinds of Cushitic. Maybe we can explain their absence in Northwest Semitic as arising from the influx of the Caucasus population. The newcomers seem to have done a good job of learning Semitic overall, but, like me when I was taking my first course in Modern Standard Arabic, gave up once they hit the broken plurals.

Then again, Proto-Northwest-Semitic doesn’t really show any contact features otherwise. We may also wonder: if the modest influx around 2000 BCE caused this linguistic effect, what did the much heavier influx at the beginning of the Bronze Age do to pre-Proto-Semitic? In the absence of any systematic reconstructions of Afroasiatic beyond the separate branches… we really have no idea. For now.

1. More recent research suggests that Chalcolithic Southern Levantines are better modeled as a mix between Neolithic Levantines, Neolithic Anatolians (connected to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B), and Chalcolithic Zagros/Caucasians. But apparently, the sampled Chalcolithic population didn’t contribute much to later South Levantine ancestry. ↩︎
2. You get a similar mismatch between Y-chromosomes and languages with Germanic. Haplogroup I1 is strongly associated with Germanic speakers and very, very common in Scandinavia today, but it goes back to what appears to have been a very small lineage of European hunter-gatherers, not the incoming Indo-European speakers. Some bearer of I1 integrated into pre-Proto-Germanic society, got really lucky in terms of male descendants, and spread his Y-haplogroup together with the new Germanic populations. ↩︎
3. At this time, more accurately “North”. ↩︎

New paper on ordinals

This blog post is now a paper, which came out unexpectedly soon: ‘Ordinal Numerals as a Criterion for Subclassification: The Case of Semitic’.

Abstract: This article explores how ordinal numerals (like first, second and third) can help classify languages, focusing on the Semitic language family. Ordinals are often formed according to productive derivational processes, but as a separate word class, they may retain archaic morphology that is otherwise lost from the language. Together with the high propensity of ‘first’ and, less frequently, ‘second’ to be formed through suppletion, this makes them highly valuable for diachronic linguistic analysis. The article identifies four main patterns of ordinal formation across different Semitic languages. Together with innovations in the lowest two ordinals, these can be correlated with more and less accepted subgroupings within Semitic as a whole. Concretely, they offer support for the widely accepted West Semitic, Northwest Semitic and Abyssinian (Ethio-Semitic) clades as well as the recently proposed Aramaeo-Canaanite clade and provide new evidence for the further subclassification of Abyssinian that matches other recent proposals. However, no evidence was found to support the debated Central Semitic or South Semitic groupings. Given the accurate identification of accepted subgroupings and high level of detail, this approach holds promise for the classification of other language families, especially where other linguistic data are scarce.

Enjoy!

#Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #news #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic

Reconstructing the Modern South Arabian dual endings

One of the many lovable features of the Modern South Arabian languages is their productive retention of the dual, in nouns, pronouns, and verbs (all persons). Some examples from Omani Mehri (Rubin 2018):

• ġáygi ṯrōh ‘two men’, contrast ġayg ‘man’ (in practice, dual nouns are nearly always followed by the numeral ‘two’)
• perfect bǝg(ǝ)dōh, bǝgǝdtōh ‘the two of them (m./f.) chased’, contrast singular bǝgūd, bǝg(ǝ)dūt and plural bǝgáwd, bǝgūd
• imperfect yǝbǝgdōh, tǝbǝgdōh ‘the two of them (m./f.) chase’, contrast singular yǝbūgǝd, tǝbūgǝd and plural yǝbǝ́gdǝm, tǝbǝ́gdǝn
• independent pronoun hay ‘the two of them’, contrast singular hē ‘he’, sē ‘she’, plural hēm, sēn ‘they (m./f.)’

Let’s look at some reconstructions.

The verb

The verbal dual ending can be reconstructed for Proto-Modern-South-Arabian as *-óh, but its deeper Semitic origin has not been explained. Dufour (2022: 77) writes:

The suffix for the dual in verbs is stressed in MSA (stable in Soqotri). It is unclear what etymon should be posited for it. Akkadian and Classical Arabic have -ā, but such an etymon would not fit the MSA forms since, as we have seen, final vowels drop in Proto-MSA (cf. the exactly identical *-ā suffix marking 3fp in the perfect: Ga *ḳadarā> OMh. ḳədū́r, J./ Ś. ḳɔdɔ́r). On the other hand, Epigraphic South Arabian attests verbal dual suffixes written with a /y/, though what this orthography stands for is unclear. Perhaps we should therefore posit *-ay or *-āy.

Both of these reconstructions run into problems, but I think we can solve those issues by combining both options and reconstructing *-ayā. Consider the following:

First, the final *-h is probably automatically added to a stressed final vowel, or at least to *-ó(h). Rubin discusses this in his § 2.2.4.

How do we get a stressed word-final vowel? Shouldn’t word-final vowels be lost, as Dufour states? Well, if we reconstruct *-ayā, then the first of those two vowels isn’t word-final. Modern South Arabian stress is super weird, but the main rule (for words containing a Proto-West-Semitic low vowel) is pretty much: stress the last, non-word-final *a or *ā. In a reconstructed form like 3m.du. perfect *bagad-ayā, that gives us *bagad-áyā, with the stress in the right part of the word: the suffix.

Next, we have to assume that *-áyā contracts to *-ó(h). *a turns to Proto-Modern-South-Arabian *o most of the time, so this just means loss of an intervocalic glide, something I don’t mind at all. In fact, there’s MSAL-internal evidence for almost exactly the same change. III-y verbs, like *bakay–a ‘he wept’, show up in MSAL as *bokóh (> OMehri bǝkōh). Before suffixes, these verbs retain their y, like OMehri tǝwōh ‘he ate’, tǝwyǝ́h ‘he ate it (m.)’. And, what do you know, so do the duals: “sǝbṭáys ‘they (two) hit her’; śǝnyáyǝh ‘they (two) saw him’”.

The difference in stress in the suffixed forms here is interesting. The 3m.sg. form tǝwy-ǝ́h shows a stressed suffix, part of a paradigm that is only used on the 3m.sg. and 3f.pl. perfects. These are exactly the forms that are reconstructed as ending in a low vowel, *-a and *-ā, respectively (explaining why the vowel right before the suffix is stressed).

Does this show that the 3du. forms did not end in *ā? Maybe. But maybe not. In Jibbali, the stressed object suffixes only occur on the 3m.sg., not on the 3f.pl. (Rubin 2014). As vowel length doesn’t usually play a role in MSAL vowel changes, this is probably due to analogy, the 3f.pl. taking the unstressed suffixes that are used everywhere else in the verb. In the same way, these suffixes could have spread to the 3du., also in Mehri where they didn’t make it to the 3f.pl. So, we could reconstruct the 3m.du. perfect forms as follows:

The numeral

The number ‘two (m.)’ has what looks like the same ending, as we saw in Omani Mehri ṯrōh. Should we reconstruct this in the same way? I don’t think so; we can get there without the triphthong. Based, in fact, on evidence from Modern South Arabian in particular, this is one of the words where we should probably reconstruct a word-initial consonant cluster in Proto-Semitic: the ‘two’ stem was probably just *θn-, with no vowel. If we add the dual nominative ending, that gives us *θn-ā. While word-final vowels normally don’t receive the stress in Proto-MSAL, here, it’s the only vowel in the word. So without further ado, we can imagine the development as pre-Proto-MSAL *θn-ā́ > Proto-MSAL *θr-óh > OMehri ṯrōh, etc. It’s really striking that the MSAL form seems to go back to a reconstruction with just an *-ā, just like Akkadian šinā. šinā doesn’t inflect for case (as far as I know), which would explain why we don’t get the expected oblique dual ending *-ay(na) here in Modern South Arabian. Adding this to my list of eerie Akkadian-MSAL isoglosses.

The feminine looks a bit confusing but at first sight I would guess it reconstructs to Proto-MSAL *θrót (e.g. Jibbali ṯrut). This regularly goes back to pre-Proto-MSAL *θn-át-ā; here, the dual ending is in a polysyllable, hence unstressed, and therefore lost.

The noun

Nouns mark the dual with a suffixed -i (mostly lost in Jibbali). Unfortunately, dual nouns can’t take possessive suffixes, so we don’t have any allomorphs to work with. Looking at other languages, I think our best bet for the reconstructed morpheme here is the nominal dual oblique ending *-ay. No nunation or mimation seems to follow (maybe because the numeral ‘two’ is always right behind the noun?). I’m not sure if *-ay should yield Proto-MSAL *-i; it doesn’t seem to in the jussive of III-y verbs.

The pronoun

Here are the forms from Rubin’s grammars, independent and suffixed:

ǝkáy indeed. Mehri gives us some support here for the idea that unstressed *-ay > *-i. Pronouns are generally a pain to reconstruct, because they all influence each other so much. I’ll venture a reconstruction of 2du. as pre-Proto-MSAL *ʔantay, *-kay and 3du. as *say, *-say, wonder out loud what the hell is going on with *k in the first person, and leave it at that.

Summing up

It looks like we can account for the Modern South Arabian dual suffixes by deriving them from *-ay in the noun and probably the pronoun, *-ā in the numeral ‘two’, and *-ayā in the verb. The first two morphemes are pretty much expected as the nominal oblique and nominative endings. For the verbal ending, as Dufour says, usually we’d expect *-ā (or is that too Arabocentric?). That suggests that we’re really looking at a double marking, *-ay-ā, with the dual verb tacking on the nominal oblique (and pronominal) *-ay suffix before the true verbal one. Maybe Old Akkadian, Ancient South Arabian, and Eblaite have some more to add to the story, but for now, this seems double-plus-good to me.

1. In case you’re confused about the *-s vs. -h, PMSAL *s regularly shifts to h in Mehri. ↩︎

#linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #ProtoSemitic

Biblicizing the Bronze Age

(This is part joke, part mnemonic; do not take it seriously.)

I had some fun aligning Levantine archeological periods with the Hexateuch (Torah + Joshua) and some possible dates in the prehistory of Hebrew. The Middle Bronze = Patriarchs and especially Late Bronze = Israelites in Egypt alignments are pretty standard, but I like how well the third millennium lined up with Genesis 2–11. Period names and dates are mostly drawn from Greenberg (2019; paywall).

(Late) Chalcolithic, ca 4000-3750: Eden

Low inequality, high standard of living. Good times.

Early Bronze, ca 3750-2200: the Antediluvian Age

Early Bronze IA, ca 3750

Expulsion from Eden, beginning of history and the Hebrew calendar. Harder, less prosperous times compared to the preceding Chalcolithic. In the east, city-building Cainites of the Middle Uruk Period bring urban civilization to Elam and Upper Mesopotamia. Breakup of Proto-Semitic.

Early Bronze IB, ca 3300

Birth of Jared. Descent of the Watchers (as per the Book of Enoch) and their teaching of arcane technologies triggers a prosperous golden age. Writing invented.

Early Bronze II, ca 3100

Birth of Methuselah (“Man of the Spear”). Armed conflicts(?) cause massive abandonment of EB I villages and a shift to more defensible, walled hilltop settlements.

Early Bronze III, ca 2850

Death of Adam. Nephilim build the pyramids. God does not like the establishment of the Akkadian Empire (is he anti-Semitic?) and gives them a 120-year warning for the Flood (Gen 6:3). In the Southern Levant: increasing isolation, inequality, continuing construction of fortifications; cities abandoned between 2500 and 2400.

Intermediate Bronze, ca 2200-2000: the Flood

4.2-kiloyear event: severe drought(!) triggers collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt and the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia. Arpachshad, Shelah, Eber. Southern Levant continues in its late EB post-urban state.

Middle Bronze, ca 2000-1550: the Patriarchal Age

Middle Bronze I, ca 2000

Tower of Babel built in the days of Peleg. Completion of the Great Ziggurat of Ur, Etemenniguru, “The House Whose Foundation Creates Terror”, commissioned by Ur-Nammu (Nimrod) ca 2100. Breakup of Proto-Northwest-Semitic.

Middle Bronze II, ca 1800

Birth of Abraham. Beginning of the Amorite Age: Northwest Semitic–speaking dynasties establish themselves from Babylon to the Nile Delta (convenient for travellers from, say, Ur to Haran to Canaan to Egypt). High point of the Levantine city-states.

Middle Bronze III, ca 1650

Birth of Jacob. Hyksos period in Egypt. Separation from MB II is “largely an artifact of historical interpretation” and “archaeologically elusive” (Greenberg 2019: 181).

Late Bronze, ca 1550-1200: the Sojourn in Egypt

Late Bronze I, ca 1550

Birth of Joseph. New Kingdom of Egypt expels Hyksos and starts to assert itself over Canaan. Breakup of Proto-Canaanite.

Late Bronze IIA, ca 1400

Death of Joseph’s generation. Israelites in Egypt grow into a great and mighty people. Egyptian Empire fully controls Canaan. Amarna Letters.

Late Bronze IIB, ca 1300

19th Dynasty in Egypt, oppression of the Israelites. Birth of Moses. Egyptian Empire firmly entrenched in Canaan. Texts from Ugarit.

Transitional Bronze-Iron, ca 1200-1000: Exodus, Joshua, Judges

Exodus, desert wanderings, conquest of Canaan, Judges period; Late Bronze Age Collapse. Israelite settlements appear in the highlands of Cis- and Transjordan, Philistines show up on the southern coastal plain. The rise and fall of the New Kingdom (1550–1150) together cover 400 years (Gen 15:13).

After the Hexateuch/Bronze Age, things get even less controversial (apart from one big debate): Iron IB (last 150 years of Greenberg’s TBI) is the period of the Judges/very early monarchy; Iron IIA early flourishing of the kingdom of Israel (pick your dynasty); Iron IIB, properly divided monarchy/rise of Aram-Damascus; Iron IIC, Neo-Assyrian period and peak kingdom of Judah. But at that point, the Bronze Age is half a millennium ago. All in all, I’m just glad I’ll be able to annoy people by referring to the EB as the Antediluvian Bronze Age going forward.

#Amorite #archaeology #Bible #Egyptian #Exodus #Genesis #Hebrew #Joshua #ProtoSemitic

New publications and podcast

Busy year for publications (think that’s it for me this year):

Semitic *ʾilāh- and Hebrew אלהים‎: From plural ‘gods’ to singular ‘God’ (Open Access)

Abstract: The Biblical Hebrew word אלהים‎ is plural in form. Semantically and syntactically, however, it can be plural or singular. The stem of this noun can be reconstructed as * ʾilāh-. As already noted by Wellhausen, this looks like a broken plural of *ʾil-, the Proto-Semitic word for ‘god’. This article takes Wellhausen’s observation and uses it to explain the plural morphology of Hebrew אלהים‎. I argue that *ʾilāh- should be reconstructed with redundant plural suffixes in some parts of the paradigm. This reconstructed paradigm is preserved virtually unchanged in Archaic Biblical Hebrew. The reconstructed paradigm also explains the almost complete replacement of *ʾil- by *ʾilāh- in Aramaic and Arabic and allows us to reassess the reasons for the association between the lexeme ‘god’ and plural number. Consequently, earlier suggestions that see אלהים‎’s plural number as a reflection of pre-Yahwistic polytheism or as a marker of abstractness are no longer tenable.

The varying size of the Sodom coalition in Genesis 14 (in FS Tigchelaar; email me for a PDF)

Trying my hardest to find something that might interest newly retired KU Leuven professor Eibert Tigchelaar, I used some Dead Sea Scrolls and other Second Temple literature as well as other textual and linguistic evidence to seek for order in the number of kings on Sodom’s side in Gen 14. Turns out that this closely aligns with other indications of different layers in this fascinating chapter: one about a local raid, one that may be a reworking of a lost epic, and a third one building on the combination of the first two. If you understand Dutch (or want to practice!), also check out this brand new episode of Timo Epping’s Oudheid, all about this question.

#AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #Bible #Canaanite #GeEz #Genesis #Hebrew #Hosea #linguistics #news #Phoenician #ProtoSemitic

Update on Mehri goats

Earlier today, I wrote:

PS *ʕVnz- ‘she-goat’ > Mehri, Harsusi wōz, Jibbali oz, Soqotri o’oz (? but then where did the *ʕ go?)

It just struck me that this is one of the lexically determined words that take ḥ- as the definite article in Mehri and Harsusi, at least. Many of these words used to start with a *ʔ—like M. ḥa-ynīθ ‘women’!—but not all of them; Rubin (2018) mentions some kinship terms where it’s analogical, for instance.

The word for ‘goat’ also happens to have a suppletive plural; from memory, that’s ḥə-rawn. This is probably one of the words where the shape of the article is due to original presence of *ʔ-: Rubin compares Syriac arn-o ‘mountain goat’.

Suppose the singular is from *ʕVnᵈz– and it took the ḥ-article by analogy with the plural. That means we might expect something like *ḥ–ʕōz for ‘the she-goat’. With two pharyngeals in a row, this would be a great environment for the *ʕ to be lost, yielding the attested form, ḥ–ōz. The indefinite form, wōz, would then in turn have been formed by analogy with the definite form. IMHO, this shores up the derivation from *ʕVnᵈz– and supports loss of *n directly before another consonant in an ancestor of the MSAL (provided we can make it work for Jibbali and Soqotri as well).

#Aramaic #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #ProtoSemitic

‘Woman’ in Modern South Arabian, Amorite, and Ugaritic

Some Modern South Arabian languages have a weird-looking word for ‘woman’: Mehri tēθ, Harsusi and Jibbali teθ. The θ makes it look similar to Proto-Semitic *ʔanθ–at-, which underlies Ugaritic a͗θt, Hebrew ʔiššā, Syriac <ʔntt-ʔ> at-o, Akkadian aššat- ‘wife’, etc. The same root also gives Arabic ʔunθ-ay– ‘female’1. But what about that initial t-?

For years, I’ve kind of assumed the Modern South Arabian words also come from something like *ʔanθ–at-, with the first part being lost and *θ-et then metathesizing to *teθ. It’s weird, but it was my best guess. But here’s a new guess I like better.

In late 2022 (paywalled), Andrew George and Manfred Krebernik published what they aptly referred to as “two remarkable vocabularies”, containing what is probably the first known connected text in Amorite, a Northwest Semitic language of the early second millennium BCE. One of the many surprises these texts contain is the word for ‘woman’ (unambiguously written with a Sumerogram in the Akkadian translation), ta-aḫ-ni-šum. Based on comparisons to the Semitic words above and known Amorite/Akkadian spelling conventions, this looks like *taʔnīθ-um, yet another different noun formation from the *ʔ-n-θ root. As I learned from a recent handout byTania Notarius, Ugaritic also attests a form that looks related: ti͗nθt ‘women’, ‘females’, plausibly /tiʔnīθ-āt-u/.

Both of these forms show a t- prefix, part of a pattern that usually forms abstracts—although concrete nouns in this pattern also occur, like Hebrew < Aramaic talmīḏ– ‘student’. And the Amorite, at least, lacks a feminine suffix. So that’s starting to look like our MSAL *teθ. Could this be a full cognate, with *teθ coming from *taʔnīθ-?

That depends on whether we can get rid of the first two radicals, *ʔ and *n. As far as I know, Proto-Semitic *ʔ was regularly lost on the way to Modern South Arabian. So that’s fine. What about *n, is this one of the (surprisingly) many branches of Semitic where it assimilates to following consonants? Let’s check out some likely etyma with *n before a consonant:

• PS *ʔanta ‘you (m.sg.)’ > Mehri, Harsusi hēt, Jibbali hɛt (if this is the right etymon)
• PS *ʔantum ‘you (m.pl.)’ > Mehri ətēm, Harsusi etōm, Jibbali tum, Soqotri ten
• PS *ʕVnz- ‘she-goat’ > Mehri, Harsusi wōz, Jibbali oz, Soqotri o’oz (? but then where did the *ʕ go? [update])

That’s all I’ve got, for now. The plural pronoun looks good, though. Of course, in *taʔnīθ-, the *n isn’t directly before the θ, so why should it assimilate? After assigning the stress to the first *a—a strange, but reliable rule in pre-MSAL—we could imagine something like
*táʔnīθ > *táʔnəθ (vowel reduction) >
*táʔənθ (metathesis) >
*táʔəθθ (assimilation) >
*teθθ (loss of the glottal stop, vowel contraction, MSAL vowel weirdness)
*teθ (degemination—not entirely clear whether this is regular).

Writing it out like that, the non-gemination of the θ (also word-internally, as in the Mehri dual tēθ–i) may also be a problem for assuming a derivation from the *ʔ-n-θ root.2 Still, this is commonly assumed; supporting evidence comes from the plural forms, like Mehri yənīθ, where the n is visible. So, since the t- in *teθ really does look like a prefix, I think Amorite *taʔnīθ- is an exciting form to compare.

1. And apparently “in the dual, obsolete” (Wiktionary), ‘testicles’. ↩︎
2. Or maybe it isn’t; none of the other potential examples of *n-assimilation yield geminates. Either way, reflexes of the *n are partially missing in some other languages where it should yield a geminate: Hebrew ʔḗšeṯ ‘wife of’ < *ʔiθ-t-, Akkadian alt- ‘wife’ < *ʔaθ-t-. I assume these are language-internal, ad hoc simplifications of the geminate, maybe triggered by the lack of stress in the frequent construct and pronominally possessed forms or by the creation of a pre-consonantal geminate when the short *-t- form of the feminine suffix was used. Perhaps that’s also what happened in MSAL, something like *teθθ–k ‘your wife’ > *teθ–k, with generalization of the *teθ base. ↩︎

#Akkadian #Amorite #Arabic #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #ProtoSemitic #Syriac #Ugaritic

Two new chapters

Earlier this year, two chapters I wrote a while back appeared in print. A third one should come out any moment now and I was waiting to combine all three in a single post, but it’s taking longer than expected, so here they are. Abstracts by (some of) the respective volume editors:

‘The Shape of the Teen Numerals in Central Semitic’ (Open Access)

This study reconstructs the morphology of teen numerals in Central Semitic languages, covering Northwest Semitic, Arabic, and Sabaic. The formation follows a digit-teen order with gender agreement, unlike many other Semitic languages. The digit stems largely align with previous reconstructions, but significant attention is given to the numeral ‘one’, posited as *ʿist-ān- for masculine and *ʿist-ay- for feminine forms, derived from a Proto-Semitic root distinct from the later adjectival *ʾaḥad-. The paper also examines the endings in the teen numerals, showing that the uninflecting *-a likely preserves an ancient feature. The distinct morphology of feminine forms, especially the Northwest Semitic *ʿiśrihi, reflects an innovative feminine suffix *-ihi, also evidenced in Arabic demonstratives. The study concludes that many features of the teen numerals result from both inherited and innovative elements within the linguistic group.

‘Sound Change in the Hebrew Reading Tradition’ (email me for the PDF)

Benjamin D. Suchard’s contribution (…) investigates for Biblical Hebrew “to what degree this corpus retained its phonological independence from the vernacular forms of Hebrew and Aramaic spoken by the people who transmitted it”. The text of the Hebrew Bible was fixed early on, but it does not write vowels and has a simplified spelling also in other respects. On the other hand, vocalizations as codified in the Tiberian reading tradition show that the text of the Hebrew Bible was also orally transmitted. Suchard argues that these vocalizations provide evidence for two categories of sound change affecting the orally transmitted text: vowel changes that also occurred in the (Hebrew or Aramaic) vernacular, and vowel changes that have no parallel in the vernacular. According to Suchard, then, there is evidence that the Hebrew reading tradition resisted vernacular sound changes, and even that it underwent sound changes that did not take place in the vernacular. Suchard proposes that these changes took place while Hebrew was still a spoken language.

#AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #Bible #Hebrew #linguistics #news #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic

Kogan on the Proto-Semitic Sprachraum

At the Rethinking Proto-Semitic workshop, Leonid Kogan mentioned his suggestion of “Canaan” as the point of dispersal of the Semitic languages, published in an Encyclopedia Aethiopica article.1 Since it isn’t available online, I thought I’d share the relevant paragraph, concise and encyclopedic as it is. (Footnotes mine.)

Lexicostatistics suggest that proto-S. disintegrated in the mid-5th millennium B.C. (Militarev 2000: 303).2 The Arabian homeland of Semites, popular in earlier studies (s. references in Henninger 1968: 10),3 does not look attractive today in view of the well-developed agricultural terminology of proto-S. (Aro 1964)4 and the existence of contact lexemes between proto-S. (PS) and proto-Indo-European (PIE *tauro- – PS *ṯawr- ‘bull’, *gwern- ‘millstone’ – *gurn- ‘threshold’,5 *woino- – *wayn- ‘wine’, *Haster- ‘star’ – *ʿaṯtar- ‘astral deity’, Gamkrelidze–Ivanov 1984: 871-76),6 both of which point to a more northern locality (the combination of *dubb- ‘bear’, *riʾm- ‘aurochs’ and *ṯapan- ‘hyrax’ in proto-S. animal vocabulary suggests Phoenicia and Palestine).

1. Leonid Kogan, 2010. ‘Semitic’, in Siegbert Uhlig (ed.), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 4 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz), 615-17. ↩︎
2. Alexander Militarev, 2000. ‘Towards the Chronology of Afrasian (Afroasiatic and its Daughter Families’, in Colin Renfrew et al. (eds.), Time Depth in Historical Linguistics (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research), 267-307. ↩︎
3. Joseph Henninger, 1968. Über Lebensraum und Lebensformen der Frühsemiten. Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Forschung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen: Geisteswissenschaften 151. Cologne: Opladen. ↩︎
4. Jussi Aro, 1963(!). ‘Gemeinsemitische Ackerbauterminologie’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 113, 471-80. ↩︎
5. Probably a mistaken gloss for ‘threshing floor’. ↩︎
6. Tamaz Gamkrelidze and Vjačeslav Ivanov, 1984. Индоевропейский язык и индоевропейцы: Реконструкция и историко-типологический анализ праязыка и протокультуры. Tbilisi: Tbilisi University Press. More recently, see Rasmus Bjørn’s article discussed here and, specifically on ‘bull/ox’, Bernard (2024; paywalled). ↩︎

#IndoEuropean #linguistics #ProtoSemitic

Rethinking Proto-Semitic

This week, I was stoked to attend a workshop in Marburg, Germany, entitled “Rethinking Proto-Semitic” and organized by profs Stefan Weninger and Michael Waltisberg. Despite some cancellations, the workshop had an amazing lineup of speakers—and a terrific atmosphere. Here’s my summary of the talks.

Leonid Kogan, “What can we learn from Eblaite on Proto-Semitic morphology?” Ongoing study and decipherment of the 24th-century BCE East Semitic language from Ebla, Syria shows the following features that are interesting for reconstruction:

1. personal pronouns: independent 1sg. /ʔanā/, 1pl. /nuḥnū/, 2m.sg. /ʔatta/, 2m.pl. /ʔattunu/, 3m.sg. /suwa/, 3f.sg. /siya/; suffixed 1du. /-nay/, 1pl. /-nu/, 2du. /-kumay(n)/, 3du. /-sumay(n)/
2. 3m.pl. prefix conjugation /ti-…-ū/
3. t-perfect, as in Mesopotamian Akkadian
4. autobenefactive use of the ventive /-am/
5. no subjunctive marker -u, unlike Mesopotamian Akkadian (this is big)
6. t-stem infinitives with both prefixation and infixation, like dar-da-bí-tum /tartappidum/ ‘to roam here and there’, cf. ra-ba-tum /rapādum/ ‘to roam’
7. nominal oblique “masculine” plural ending /-ay/, as reconstructed for Sargonic Akkadian and Assyrian and compatible with Babylonian; unlike Central Semitic *-ī-na
8. singular case endings preserved in the construct state and before pronominal suffixes, e.g. ba-lu da-a-tim /baʕlu daʕātim/ ‘owner of knowledge (nom.)’, me-gi-ru12-zu /migrusu/ ‘his favourite (nom.)’
9. productive use of terminative *-is, e.g. DU-ti-iš /halaktis/ ‘for the journey’
10. ‘twenty’ with -ū vowel like Central Semitic, not -ā like other languages

Maria Bulakh, “Intercalated *a as a plural marker in Soqotri and its implications for the reconstruction of Proto-Semitic”. While superficially hard to recognize (and Jorik and I didn’t attempt to in our paper on this subject), reconstruction of Modern South Arabian and especially Soqotri attest insertion of *-a- between the second and third radical of *CVCC- nouns in the plural. No external plural suffix though.

Me, “Rethinking the Proto-Semitic stative”. Slides here. Got some good suggestions for languages where I could go looking for a synchronic distinction between resultative *qatal-a and preterit *ya-qtul.

Ahmad Al-Jallad, “Revisiting the post-verbal morphemes *-u and *-n(V) in Semitic: a proposal for a unified theory”. The different verbal suffixes/enclitics shaped like -u and -n(V) in Akkadian, Central Semitic possibly Modern South Arabian, and Gurage (South Abyssinian) could all descend from the Proto-Semitic *=u(m) locative, which gained various subordinating and durative meanings. Central Semitic *ya-qtul-u instead of *ya-qattal-u for the imperfect could show a collapse in the distinction between *ya-qtul and *ya-qattal related to the rise of the West Semitic perfect *qatal-a.

Michael Waltisberg, “Issues of reconstructive methodology in Semitics”. Based on his review of Rebecca Hasselbach(-Andee)’s 2013 Case in Semitic, Waltisberg discussed some methodological questions like whether our reconstructed Proto-Semitic represents an actually spoken language or just maps correspondences between different languages and whether there is room for dialectal diversity and different chronological stages within a protolanguage. (Prof. Hasselbach-Andee sadly had to cancel her planned attendance.)

Lutz Edzard, “Linguistic divergence and convergence in Arabic and Semitic revisited”. As the most protolanguage-sceptic scholar at the workshop, Edzard reviewed some of his problems with the linear-descent-only family tree model where every language in a family descends from a kind of ancestral singularity with no internal diversity.

Vera Tsukanova, “What can modern Arabic dialects reveal about the etymology of the L-stem in Semitic?” The development of the L-stem (*qātal-) in historical Arabic suggests that it is more likely that this stem originally had a concrete meaning like applicative that was bleached in some languages than that it was originally vague and acquired its specific meaning in pre-Arabic.

Eran Cohen, “Semitic k-based similative particles—comparative and diachronic aspects”. Different Semitic particles starting with k- can be diachronically related to each other according to recognized historical pathways of development.

Na’ama Pat-El, “Homomorphs and reconstruction”. We are probably not dealing with one, syncretic morpheme but rather two homophonous ones in the cases of 1) prefix conjugation 2m.sg./3f.sg. *t-; (2) f.sg. abstract noun/m.pl. adjective suffix *-ūt-; (3) f.sg. noun or adjective/weak root verbal noun or infinitive suffix *-t-. In the latter, most controversial case, Pat-El invoked some evidence that the verbal nouns like Biblical Hebrew šéḇeṯ ‘sitting’ (from y-š-b) are syntactically masculine (e.g. Ps 133:1).

Stefan Weninger, “The Semitic Urheimat question: a review of the proposals and some perspectives”. An overview of some proposed points of dispersal for the Semitic languages since the late 19th century, the main contenders being the Arabian peninsula and East and North Africa. In the Q&A, Kogan added his own suggestion, published in an Encyclopedia Aethiopica article: Canaan.

Walter Sommerfeld, “The concept of a common Semitic cultural area (‘Kish Civilization’) in the 3rd millennium”. Contemporary evidence shows that there is no basis for Ignace Gelb’s concept of a distinctly Semitic culture in Early Dynastic northern Babylonia.

Apart from these talks, we spent about half the time in unstructured panel discussions, on phonology, morphology, methodology, and classification/Urheimat questions. Each discussion was kicked off by a short, stimulating talk, mostly by attendees who did not present full papers: Martin Kümmel, Michaël Cysouw, and Aaron Rubin. This was an experimental feature of the workshop, and I’m on the fence about it; the discussions were certainly fun and a lot of interesting points were brought up (e.g. Kogan: linguistic paleontology shows that Proto-Semitic speakers did know hyraxes but did not know oryxes, and only Canaan is [+hyrax][-oryx]), but it felt like they yielded fewer concrete insights than regular talks would have. It was a nice way to get some more people involved, though, also from adjacent fields (Indo-European/Indo-Iranian and Caucasian/Germanic linguistics).

All in all, it was wonderful to be able to fully geek out about Proto-Semitic and its daughters for a couple of days. There’s plans to publish proceedings, so hopefully in a few years you’ll be able to read all about these topics in full detail. Stay tuned.

#Akkadian #Arabic #Berber #conference #EastCushitic #Eblaite #Egyptian #Gurage #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #ProtoSemitic

Leiden Summer School 2025

The program for this year’s Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics is up. Besides the Caucasian, Chinese, Language Description, Language Documentation, Indo-European (I/II), Celtic, Indology, Iranian, Linguistics (I/II), Mediterranean World, and Russian tracks, here’s the line-up for Semitic this year:

• An introduction to Arabic paleography and epigraphy (Ahmad Al-Jallad)
• Comparative Semitics (Marijn van Putten with guest lectures by me and maybe others)
• Rabbinic Hebrew (Martin Baasten)
• Classical Ethiopic (Martin Baasten)

Registration opens soon! The Summer School will run from July 21st through August 1st.

#Arabic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #news #ProtoSemitic #Rabbinic

Shocked to learn that French niquer 'to fuck' was borrowed from (Algerian) #Arabic. The root n-y-k is of a venerable, #Proto-Semitic age, with cognates including #Akkadian niākum.

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4fgo4mainvwv6pjl2qrs27q2/post/3ldniwoxijk27

The Semitic languages show a regular correspondence of p in some languages and f in others. For instance, ‘mouth’ in Akkadian is p-ū; Biblical Hebrew pe; Biblical Aramaic pūm; Ge’ez ʾäf;1 and Classical Arabic fam-. (Modern South Arabian should have an f too, but has replaced this word.) This sound is uncontroversially reconstructed as Proto-Semitic *p, as in *p-ūm ‘mouth’.2 Traditionally, the change of *p to f was taken as a diagnostic feature of the South Semitic languages.

[p] to [f], a plosive changing into a fricative, is an example of lenition. Lenition is a common type of sound change, so we tell our students, so it makes sense that *p is the older sound and it changed to f. So far, so good.

While preparing my first couple of classes for Comparative Semitics this year, I suddenly wasn’t so sure about this anymore. Two things bother me:

1. The examples of p > f I know about are all part of a larger change affecting other plosives too, like Grimm’s Law (Proto-Indo-European *p, *t, *k, *kw > Proto-Germanic *f, *þ, *h, *hw and related changes) or Aramaic and Hebrew BGDKPT-spirantization. Is just p turning to f really so common? How about just f turning into p?
2. Most scholars don’t accept the family tree above anymore. In the current model, the changes look more like this:

Now we need three or four separate instances of *p > *f—just as I’m starting to doubt how common that change is. Huehnergard & Rubin (2011), who argue for this second family tree, explain this as an areal change that spread through contact. But what kind of a contact scenario should we think of here? Did f spread from Ancient South Arabian (if those languages even had it) to all its neighbours? It’s not like we see enough other shared contact features to confidently posit a South Semitic language area or something.

Looking at Afroasiatic, things don’t get better:

• Berber has f, not p
• Cushitic has f, not p
• Egyptian has p and f, but we don’t know which one corresponds to Semitic *p (if either)
• Chadic: same as Egyptian, to my knowledge
• (I’m not sure Omotic is Afroasiatic, still reading up on this)

So if we posit Proto-Semitic *p, either we need two more independent cases of *p > *f (Berber, Cushitic),3 maybe more (Egyptian? Chadic?), or we reconstruct *f for Proto-Afroasiatic and say Proto-Semitic changed *f to *p. At which point, why not cut out the middleman and keep *f, then change it to *p in East and Northwest Semitic? Just two changes instead of the minimum of six you need otherwise.

So, are there any good arguments to reconstruct Proto-Semitic *p—or should we press *f and leave behind this relic from theories that believed in a South Semitic subgrouping?

1. Probably influenced by Cushitic, but we can still take it as related to the other Semitic words. ↩︎
2. In my opinion, the only word known so far with a superheavy syllable, exceptionally permitted because the word is monosyllabic. ↩︎
3. I’m also really starting to doubt that Cushitic is one family. So maybe make that four (Berber, Beja, Agaw, East/South Cushitic). ↩︎

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/11/07/froto-semitic/

#Afroasiatic #Agaw #Akkadian #Ancie #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Berber #Chadic #Cushitic #Egyptian #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthAr #Omotic #ProtoSemitic

Trying to learn more about Ethiopia(n Semitic languages), I just finished reading William A. Shack’s The Central Ethiopians. Amhara, Tigriňa and related peoples (1974; London: International African Institute). It’s 50 years old, many of the sources it uses are over 100 years old, and I’m sure it’s full of inaccuracies I didn’t recognize besides the ones I did, but it’s a place to start.

On the traditional religion of the Western Gurage, Shack writes (p. 113):

Yəgzär is the supreme god of the Gurage, the creator of the world. However, there is no cult addressed to Yəgzär, as there are to lesser deities, the most important of which are the cults of Waq, the male “Sky-god,” of Dämwamwit, the female deity, and Božä, the ‘Thunder-God.” Each clan has its own local Waq; Dämwamwit and Božä are central deities for the säbat bet federation. … In Gurage belief, Yəgzär handed over to Božä the responsibility of regulating the daily conduct of Gurage and affording ritual protection against theft and the destruction of property by arson.

Two things stand out to me here:

1. The creator god as a “high god” who is not the most commonly worshiped one and has handed over control to another god, specifically the god of thunder. This mirrors the relationship between Ilu and Ba’lu at Ugarit. But also compare Kronos and Zeus in Greek mythology, or maybe Odin and Thor in Germanic religion.
2. “Each clan has its own local Waq“.1 This sounds very Iron Age West Semitic to me. Think of Israel and Judah worshiping YHWH, the Ammonites worshiping Milkom, the Moabites and Kemosh, the Edomites and Qaws… We also find this in Ancient South Arabia, as I learned from Imar Koutchoukali during the last Leiden Summer School: there, everyone venerated Athtar, but each kingdom again had its own particular tutelary deity, like Almaqah for the Sabaeans and Wadd for the Minaeans. We seem to have an explicit description of this theology in Deut 32:8–9:

When Elyon apportioned the nations,
    when he divided humankind,
he fixed the boundaries of the peoples
    according to the number of the children of God;2
YHWH’s portion was his people,
    Jacob his allotted share.

(adapted from NRSV)

Feature (1) occurs in some shape or another in a lot of religions, especially ones from the Near East, and it may well have spread through contact. The Gurage Zone is far enough away, though, that I wonder whether this points to an inheritance from Proto-West-Semitic times. Feature (2) seems less common to me, although that could just be my ignorance speaking. Also, I’m not really sure how the difference between a thunder god and a sky god works out in practice; maybe I should read the other publications by Shack he refers to in this passage. But for now, creator-god-appoints-thunder-god-as-ruler and each-political-unit-has-its-tutelary-sky-god as reconstructible elements of Proto-Semitic religion makes for an exciting hypothesis.

1. The name Waq is borrowed from (Lowland?) East Cushitic, but from what I’ve read on Wikipedia he’s more important there and the localized aspect may be missing. ↩︎
2. MT: “the children of Israel”; commonly reconstructed like this based on LXX “the angels of God” ↩︎

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/10/20/gurage-evidence-for-proto-semitic-religion/

#AncientSouthArabian #Bible #Cushitic #Deuteronomy #Gurage #Hebrew #ProtoSemitic #religion

A friend asks: what’s the deal with all the different Hebrew s sounds—ס, שׁ, שׂ, ת, צ—historically? How would they have been pronounced by Moses, David, or Ezra?1

Here’s an overview of how these sibilants, and relatedly the plosives ת and ט, were pronounced at different points in time, with some reconstructed example words. I won’t give a detailed argumentation for every reconstruction, but I’ll note the kind of evidence we have for each period.

Each table of reconstructions links to a voice recording.

Proto-Semitic up to the Late Bronze Age

Ancestors of Hebrew probably preserved the Proto-Semitic values of these sounds, which we can reconstruct based on comparison to other Semitic languages, up to the late 2nd millennium BCE. Evidence also comes from transcriptions in Egyptian hieroglyphs and from the way the Northwest Semitic alphabet was borrowed into Greek.

The שׁ mostly goes back to a plain *s sound. Some words with שׁ originally had a *θ as in think. The שׂ was a voiceless lateral fricative, *ɬ. ס was originally an affricate, *ts. The צ derives from the ejective counterparts of the last three sounds: *θ’, *ɬ’, and *ts’. The ת/תּ used to be a plain *t in every position, while the ט was its ejective version, *t’.

Reconstructions ca. 13th century BCE (Moses?):

First Temple Period

A bunch of mergers and chain shifts take place before we get to Hebrew proper. The *s and *θ merge and then shift back a bit to become a postalveolar *š. The old *ts loses its affrication and becomes a new plain sibilant *s. The corresponding ejectives merge but probably could be pronounced with or without a little t preceding: *(t)s’.

It’s hard to date these changes. I assume they’re reflected in Neo-Assyrian transcriptions but I’m not actually sure about that, would have to check (and it could be hard to see in the cuneiform script). Egyptian might be useful here too, but I don’t recall reading about that kind of evidence either.

Reconstructions ca. 10th century BCE (King David):

Second Temple Period

At some point, the plosive *t became aspirated: this is consistently reflected in Greek transcriptions of Hebrew, Phoenician, and, well, every Semitic language, really. As argued by Ola Wikander in a paper that I don’t think is available online, the ejectives like *t’ may also have begun to have had a ‘darker’, uvularized pronunciation (as in Arabic) this early already. The lateral fricative and ejective merged with the sibilants at some point during the Second Temple Period, resulting in some variation between שׂ and ס in certain Biblical texts.

Reconstructions ca. 5th-4th century BCE (Ezra the Scribe):

Roman Period

Another change that is hard to date: when the non-emphatic plosives (*bgdkhphth) follow a vowel, they become fricatives (*vʁðχfθ) at a certain point. This brings us close to the last shared ancestor of the surviving Jewish pronunciations of Hebrew, which can be reconstructed based on its descendants as well as Greek and Latin transcriptions.

Reconstructions ca. 2nd century CE (Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi):

Tiberian Hebrew

Jews that spoke Arabic in their daily lives, which includes the Tiberian Masoretes, used the Arabic realization for the original ejectives: *s’ and *t’ become *sʶ and *tʶ. For the reconstruction of Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation, see Khan (2020; Open Access).

Reconstructions ca. 10th century CE, Tiberias (Aaron ben Moses ben Asher):

Many pronunciations from the Arab world realize ת as t instead of θ (Yemen is a notable exception), I guess because their dialects of Arabic shift θ to t too.

Ashkenazi Hebrew

Similarly, the Ashkenazi pronunciations were shaped by the sounds of Yiddish. As no θ was available, s was used as the next best thing. The ejectives lost their ejectivity, with the t of the *(t)s’ becoming mandatory.

Reconstructions ca. 10th century CE, Ashkenaz (Rabbeinu Gershom):

And thats it’!

1. I’m going to provide Biblical and Jewish celebrities as a reference for each reconstruction given below. Especially for the older ones, this isn’t meant to endorse the way the Bible depicts them as 100% historical. ↩︎

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/03/05/hebrew-ss-and-ts-a-timeline/

#Bible #explainers #Hebrew #linguistics #ProtoSemitic

Two recent publications by Marijn van Putten deserve your attention:

• ‘The Berbero-Semitic adjective’, BSOAS (Open Access). Abstract: “It has long been recognized that the Semitic suffix conjugation and the Berber adjectival perfective suffix conjugation have striking similarities in their morphology, which has been correctly attributed to be the result of a shared inheritance from Proto-Afro-Asiatic. Nevertheless, the function of these conjugations in the respective language families is quite distinct. This article argues that ultimately this suffix conjugation is a predicative suffix in the common ancestor of Berber and Semitic, and moreover shows that Semitic and Berber have significant overlap in the stem formations of adjectives. It is argued that these formations must likewise be reconstructed for their common ancestor.”
• ‘Segolate Plurals and North-West Semitic’, on his blog. Some comments:

Pluralses

Marijn argues against the view that a major shared innovation of the Northwest Semitic languages (Canaanite, Aramaic, Ugaritic et al.) is the regular insertion of *a in the plural of *CVCC– nouns (‘segolates’ in Hebraist terminology) and the replacement of broken plurals by external plurals, including these doubly marked *CVCaC-ū– and *CVCaC-āt– ones. As Jorik Groen and I noted under Marijn’s strong influence, the *a-insertion does not seem to be a Northwest Semitic innovation at all, but arose in pre-Proto-Semitic. “But …

…  I think the whole discussion, by focusing on these segolate plurals is in fact a red herring. Arabic’s plural system cannot be simply compared to the North-West Semitic plural system, and by assuming that they get equated important details are lost. I think if we take a more subtle approach, we can actually come to see a much more pervasive innovation in North-West Semitic, but it has nothing to do with segolate plurals.

Instead of the simple singular-plural distinction typical of Northwest Semitic, Arabic often distinguishes several plurals. Some of these are ‘paucals’, meaning they refer to a small number, and some nouns also have a singulative-collective distinction. Marijn illustrates this with singular (actually singulative?) baqar-at– ‘cow’ (/’head of cattle’), paucal baqar-āt– ‘(three to ten) cows’ (/’heads of cattle’), collective baqar- ‘cattle’, and plural ʔabqār– ‘cows’. We could add dual baqar-at–ā/ay-ni ‘pair of cows’, another category that is no longer productive in Iron Age Northwest Semitic.

Let me cite another passage, because it’s going to be important:

Masculine nouns, by definition cannot have collectives, but otherwise have the same system as the feminine, e.g. sg. kalb ‘dog’ pauc. ʔaklub (not **kalab-ūn) pl, kilāb. The notable difference here is therefore that the masculine nouns use a broken plural pattern (rather than a suffixed pattern) to makes the paucal (feminine nouns can actually do this too niʕmah pauc niʕa/imāt, ʔanʕum)

Arab grammarians state that all these plurals with an ʔa– prefix are actually paucals. But these forms are pretty isolated: they only occur in “South Semitic” (Arabic, Ancient and Modern South Arabian, and Ethiosemitic; probably not a genealogical subgroup) and the patterns attested in different languages don’t match that well, making them hard to reconstruct. So, Marijn suggests:

1. Proto-Semitic distinguished between singular, paucal (formed with the external plural suffixes, and *a-insertion if the singular stem was *CVCC-), and (broken) plural;
2. Northwest Semitic extends the use of the paucal to the plural, getting rid of the broken plurals; but
3. Arabic (in contact with the rest of “South Semitic”?) introduces new paucal ʔa– forms which replace the old ‘masculine’ paucals and compete with the ‘feminine’ ones.

So much for the summary, now I get to add some thoughts of my own.

Paucals or singulative plurals?

I’m no Arabist, and it would be great to check this in Bettega & D’Anna (2023), but I think Marijn may be conflating a few categories. The way I understand it, the distinction between collective baqar– ‘cattle’ and singulative baqar-at- ‘head of cattle’ (etc.) is important here: it is the basis for understanding baqar-āt– as the plural of the singulative, ‘heads of cattle’. This would be used when talking about several individuated cows, as opposed to a group of non-individuated ʔabqār– ‘cows’ or a collective of baqar– ‘cattle’. Since collectives are uncountable by default, the paucal numerals three through ten call for the use of the individuated/singulative plural, which may result in some overlap between the singulative plural and the paucal in usage.

This distinction becomes important with the masculines, where e.g. ʔaklub– is apparently a paucal, but not a plural singulative (because kalb- isn’t a singulative; there isn’t a contrasting collective). And in the competing feminine cases, I think there might be a contrast between plural singulative niʕim-āt-/niʕam-āt- ‘(individual) favours’ and paucal ʔanʕum– ‘(three to ten) favours’.

All of this implicitly relies on the idea that the paucals were originally only used with numerals, which we might get into some other time. For now, I just want to add that these paucals may be older than Marijn suggests.

How old are the ʔa– paucals?

Marijn writes:

While the true plural pattern kilāb has excellent Afro-Asiatic comparanda, and must certainly be old, ʔaklub is in fact extremely isolated, so isolated that it only occurs in Arabic (the Gəʕəz hägär pl. ʔähgur looks superficially similar, but would be equivalent to *ʔaCCūC).

Just last month, I suggested that Ge’ez CäCuC forms go back to *CaCuC- with a short *u. We might take the superficial correspondence between these ʔaCCuC- (Arabic) and ʔäCCuC (Ge’ez) plurals as an indication that Ge’ez u comes from short *u here too, both patterns reflecting *ʔaCCuC-. Another possible match is seen in Arabic ʔaCCiC-at-, Ge’ez ʔäCCəC-t-, which can be unified in a reconstructed pattern of *ʔaCCiC-(a)t-. And both languages also have many reflexes of the *ʔaCCāC- pattern. (But these aren’t normally counted as paucals, are they?) Either way, some paucal patterns may be reconstructible after all.

Some out-there support for this comes from the word for ‘finger’, Proto-Semitic *ʔitṣbaʕ-. This probably has a cognate in Ancient Egyptian ḏbꜥ, which doesn’t have anything corresponding to the Semitic *ʔ. Since fingers are often counted and come in sets of ten[citation needed], I like the idea that *ʔitṣbaʕ- might be a back formation from an unattested paucal like *ʔatṣbuʕ-1 or *ʔatṣbiʕ-(a)t- ‘(three to ten) fingers’. Since *ʔitṣbaʕ- has reflexes with *ʔi- all over Semitic, that would imply the existence of an *ʔa– paucal in Proto-Semitic.

An important argument against these paucals being old was already raised to me by Marijn privately. ʔa– plurals are fine with a glide occurring as the second radical, as in ʔanyuq- and ʔanwuq- ‘she-camels’ or ʔabwāb- ‘doors’. But in Proto-Semitic, glides were lost between a consonant and a vowel, lengthening the following vowel. So if these forms were old, we’d expect **ʔanūq- and **ʔabāb-. But I think this could be explained by the ongoing productivity of the paucal patterns, which led to glides being restored. True, we usually don’t see analogical restoration in e.g. the *maCCaC- pattern: qwm gives maqām-, not **maqwam-. But an inflectional category like the paucal could be more susceptible to analogy than a derivational one like *maCCaC-. So I think I do lean towards old, Proto-Semitic *ʔa- paucals.

How many plurals?

Where does that leave us? Close to Marijn’s suggestion, probably, but with at least one more contrast: individuated vs. non-individuated plurals. Maybe something like:

I’m not at all sure about this, but at least it gives us a place to park every form that seems old. The difference between non-individuated plurals and collectives in this system ends up being one of markedness: words for entities that usually occur as an undifferentiated mass have an unmarked collective and derive a (feminine) singulative, while other words have an unmarked singular and an associated broken plural. All in all, this seems like a very overspecified system that could easily collapse in varying ways, giving rise to the different pluralization strategies we find in the attested languages.

1. Reflected in Arabic as ʔaṣbuʕ-, but as a byform of the singular. According to the lexicographers, both syllables of the stem can take any of the three short vowels, but only ʔiṣbaʕ- is commonly used and approved of. ↩︎

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/01/22/van-putten-berbero-semitic-adjectives-and-semitic-plurals/

#Afroasiatic #Arabic #Berber #Egyptian #GeEz #linguistics #news #ProtoSemitic

Having made the rookie mistake of reading the comments under a YouTube video (specifically this one ft.: me), I came across the following statement:

I don’t know why it’s so hard to just openly state that the single language in Eden was Hebrew? It’s clear Moses didn’t give us a translation of a foreign name into Hebrew: instead God gave Adam a Hebrew name; Adam gave his wife a Hebrew name: and all 20 generations from Adam to Abraham have Hebrew names.

@jeremycastro9700

This assumes that Genesis 1-11 is historical, which is not the standard assumption in academic linguistics. But setting that aside, it raises an interesting issue: a couple of significant names in the opening chapters of Genesis are surprisingly un-Hebrew.

First, yes, there are a few puns in the Garden of Eden story itself that absolutely do work best in Hebrew. It’s not explicitly stated, but implicitly the human (ʔāḏām) is named after the soil (ʔăḏāmā) from which he was taken.1 And the woman (ʔiššā) is explicitly called that because she is taken from a man (ʔīš).2 This supports that the story was composed in Hebrew, at least in its current form, and I guess that this is what the commenter was getting at. But note that ‘woman’ isn’t a name, and if we limit ourselves to just the Garden of Eden story, ‘human’/’Adam’ originally isn’t either. The two actual names that occur in these chapters are both problematic, in similar ways.

1. ‘Eve’ (ḥawwā) has a w that reflects the Proto-Semitic form of the verb ‘to live’, *ḥyw. In Hebrew, this verb shifted to ḥyy, which is why ‘alive (f.sg.)’ is normally not ḥawwā but ḥayyā. If “Adam gave his wife a Hebrew name”, she would be called Chaya.
2. Just like *ḥyw ‘to live’ becomes ḥyy in Hebrew, *hwy ‘to be(come)’ changes its *w to y in the vast majority of forms, giving us Hebrew hyy. It’s odd, then, that the divine name Yʜᴡʜ has the old w and not the specifically Hebrew y.

This second example has received a lot of attention. Together with other indications that worship of Yʜᴡʜ was associated with southern Transjordan, it’s one of the elements of the Kenite or Midianite hypothesis of Yahwistic origins.3 I don’t know what the ideas are about the w in ‘Eve’. Since Eve is the mother of Cain, I can imagine it could be fit into the Kenite hypothesis; in that case, the name ḥawwā would have been borrowed from whatever language or dialect the Kenites spoke. Other sources are also conceivable, as lots of languages spoken near Hebrew preserve the ‘live’ root’s *w unchanged.

Alternatively, it could be that these names were coined in a direct ancestor of Hebrew, when ‘to live’ and ‘to be’ were still *ḥyw and *hwy, and their status as personal names protected them from being updated. I think something similar happened at a much later time with the name Milcah: this preserves the original *i vowel of the noun *milkā ‘queen’ (cf. Phoenician milcot), while the noun itself was changed to malkā to more closely match *malk ‘king’. In the same way, ḥawwā ‘Eve’ could preserve an old form of the adjective ‘alive’, while the productive form ḥayyā participated in the verb’s change of the *w to y; and the same idea for Yʜᴡʜ vs. verbal forms like yihye ‘he becomes’.

All in all, the two actual names that occur in the Garden of Eden story could be borrowed from another language than Hebrew, or they could be archaic retentions from an ancestor of Hebrew, but they are not simply Hebrew; not as we know it.

1. This also works in Latin, and Latinate English: the human was taken from the humus! ↩︎
2. And this one also works in English: wo-man. I don’t know any other languages where you can easily make this pun. English in Eden confirmed? ↩︎
3. Here‘s an article I don’t necessarily agree with, and here‘s a newer one I only just found and look forward to reading. ↩︎

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/01/02/hebrew-in-eden/

#Bible #Genesis #Hebrew #linguistics #ProtoSemitic

Earlier this year, I had two fun conversations with the team of the then newly-founded Kedem YouTube channel, which popularizes scholarship on the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible. The first video was published yesterday. We talk about the concept of a language family, what languages constitute the Semitic language family, where Semitic comes from geographically and linguistically, how we can reconstruct earlier ancestors of the attested languages, and a few things this kind of reconstruction tells us about Proto-Semitic.

Stay posted for my second video with this channel, to be released sometime next year, on the different modern and—especially—ancient pronunciations of Biblical Hebrew.

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/video-intro-to-the-semitic-language-family/

#Afroasiatic #Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Berber #Chadic #Cushitic #Egyptian #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #Moabite #ModernSouthArabian #news #Omotic #Phoenician #ProtoSemitic #Tigrinya #Ugaritic

Open access in the latest issue of Afrika und Übersee (great publication experience, would recommend): ‘Two more contexts for Ge‘ez *u > u and three for *a > ǝ’. It’s a pretty technical article but I think I have some interesting things to say about various numeral patterns in particular. Abstract:

“The main Ge‘ez (Classical Ethiopic) verbal adjective is characterized by an ǝ-u vowel melody. Based on cognate evidence, the most basic form of this adjective, 01-stem 1ǝ2u3, derives from a *1a2uː3- pattern and thus shows assimilation of *aCuː > ǝCu. This assimilation does not operate in a set of specialized numerals shaped like 1ä2u3, which should be reconstructed as *1a2u3- with short *u. Short *u also yields Ge‘ez u in the nonaccusative case of the masculine cardinal numerals, like *ɬalaːθtu > śälästu ‘three’; this ending goes back to the Proto-Semitic diptotic nominative. The assimilation of *aCuː > ǝCu, on the other hand, also affected the personal pronoun *huːʔa-tuː > wǝʾǝtu, the perfect of fientive verbs like *gabaruː > gäbru ‘they did’, and the jussive of stative verbs like *yitrapuː > yǝtrǝfu ‘may they remain’. Ə was leveled to other parts of these paradigms, solving several longstanding problems of Ge‘ez morphology.”

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/12/16/new-article-some-geez-sound-changes/

#Akkadian #Arabic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #news #ProtoSemitic

My article ‘Proto-Semitic existentials: *yθaw and *laθθaw‘ has just appeared in the Journal of Northwest Semitic languages and can be accessed for free at Academia.edu or (soon, I think) through the KU Leuven repository. Abstract:

“A historical relationship has long been suspected between the Northwest Semitic existential particles like Biblical Hebrew יֵשׁ and Biblical Aramaic אִיתַי, negative existentials like Syriac layt and Akkadian laššu, the Arabic negative copula laysa, and the East Semitic verbs i-ša-wu “to exist” (Eblaite) and išû “to have” (Akkadian). But due to various formal and semantic problems, no Proto-Semitic reconstruction from which all these words can regularly be derived has yet been put forward. This article argues that the Akkadian sense of “to have” is typologically the oldest and reconstructs a Proto-Semitic grammaticalization of *yiyθaw “it has” to *yθaw “there is/are”. Also in Proto-Semitic, a negative counterpart was formed through contraction with the negative adverb “not”, yielding *layθaw and *laθθaw.”

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/12/01/new-article-proto-semitic-existentials/

#Akkadian #Amorite #Arabic #Aramaic #Bible #Eblaite #Hebrew #linguistics #news #ProtoSemitic #Syriac

Did the Proto-Indo-Europeans borrow agricultural and cultural terms from a population that spoke something close to Proto-Semitic? Rasmus Bjørn has just published a new paper (paywalled) discussing 21 (Proto-)Indo-European words that have been suggested to be borrowed from Semitic or Afroasiatic more generally and argues that yes: there are enough terms in Proto-Indo-European and its daughters to posit the existence of a Semitoid “Old Balkanic” language bordering the PIE steppe homeland to the west.

A very exciting possibility! Unfortunately, there are some issues with the words that Bjørn compares. Let’s dive right in. The main question we’ll try to answer: do these Indo-European words really have close parallels in Semitic, and if so, is there convincing evidence that Semitic was the source and not the recipient language? (I’ve modified some of the transcriptions of reconstructed words to match conventions I’m more used to. (P)IE means that a reconstruction is reflected in several branches of Indo-European but is probably not Proto-Indo-European proper.)

The comparanda

1. PIE *h₂ster– ‘star’, PS *ʕaθtar– ‘deified morning star’ (Ishtar, Astarte, etc.). Aren Wilson-Wright wrote a 2016 book about the Semitic deity and has suggested before (probably also in the book) that this is a loanword from Indo-European. I’m inclined to agree that ‘star’ > ‘deified Venus’ is a more likely development than vice versa. With four more-or-less matching consonants and very similar meanings, I think a coincidence is unlikely in this case.
2. PIE *h₃or-(n-) ‘eagle’, PS *ġVrVn– ‘eagle’. I can’t find the alleged Arabic reflex ġaran- in Lane, which leaves just Akkadian urinn- (possibly a Sumerian loanword). If these words are related, the fact that *-n- is only present in a few of the Indo-European reflexes suggests that it was borrowed from Indo-European (or a third language family) into Semitic, not vice versa.
3. PIE *ḱer-(n-)(h₂/u-) ‘horn’, PS *ḳarn– ‘horn’. Bjørn cites the PS form as *ḳar-n-, but the *n is part of the root in Semitic. I don’t know what’s going on with “Tigre ḳär(n)“, but if it lacks the –n sometimes, I’m highly skeptical that this says anything about Proto-Semitic; all of Tigre’s closest relatives do have the n. The tentative derivation from Proto-Afroasiatic *ḳar– relies on “Omotic [ḳ]ar” and “Egyptian ḳr.ty (dual) ‘horns of the crown (of one of the manifestations of Amun)’”. Omotic isn’t a language; it’s a language family, and we need attested forms to judge the possible relationship. Moreover, Omotic has not been demonstrated to be Afroasiatic. As Marwan Kilani’s personal communication in a footnote points out, the Egyptian attestation is highly specific; if it’s related to the Indo-European word, it could perhaps be a borrowing from something like Greek (I have no idea when or where the word is attested, so this may be difficult). Without any indication that the Semitic –n is a suffix, it is again hard to see the PIE word which sometimes lacks it as a borrowing from Semitic.
4. PIE *guōu– ‘cow’ (I’ve also seen this as *gueh₃(-)u-). “[T]his is an item that is not attested in PS proper while being shared with the wider Northern Afro-Asiatic speech community”, i.e. Egyptian gw (referring to a certain kind of bull). The similar words in Northwest Caucasian, Northeast Caucasian, and Sumerian (and elsewhere, like Proto-Bantu gòmbè ‘cattle’) suggest a much wider cultural diffusion and/or onomatopoeia.
5. PIE *septm ‘seven’, PS *tsabʕ– ‘seven’. I greatly appreciate the informed PS reconstruction based on some Twitter discussions we had in the past. Bjørn cites the masculine stem, *tsabʕ–at-; to really make the comparison to PIE work we should probably add the absolute state ending and make it *tsabʕ–at-Vm. Is there some known PIE process that would get rid of the laryngeal in a form like *seph2tm? If so, the fact that we can understand the *t and *m as Semitic morphemes does make PS > PIE a good possibility, if this isn’t a coincidence.
6. PIE *(s)ueḱs ‘six’, PS *sidθ– (not “*sidt”) ‘six’. “On the surface not very compelling as a contact phenomenon directly between PIE and PS, but the sequential nature and the similarities that permeate the same group of languages as for the number seven nonetheless make the comparison worth entertaining.” The similarities for ‘seven’ mainly consisted of many languages having a sibilant at the beginning. Either way, the argument for both ‘six’ and ‘seven’ being borrowed from Semitic would be much stronger if PIE ‘six’ also ended in *-tm.
7. PIE *(H)oḱtoH ‘eight’, Proto-Berber *okkuz ‘four’ (sic; this should probably be *ăkkuẓ, Maarten Kossman p.c.), (Proto?-)Kartvelian *otxo ‘four’. In the background here is the idea that the PIE numeral is a dual, either ending in the PIE dual suffix *-h1 (Bjørn thinks this unlikely) or something related to the PS dual suffix *-ā–na, making it ‘two fours’. The argument is that what looks like a coincidence for ‘eight’ individually may be significant given the pattern that ‘seven’ and ‘six’ also have relatives. We just heard the same argument for ‘six’, so where this isn’t circular, it all relies on ‘seven’. Note that ‘eight’ is not ‘two fours’ anywhere in Afroasiatic.
8. PIE *medhu- ‘sweet, mead’, PS *mtḳ ‘to be sweet’. “Likely comparanda in both NE Caucasian and Uralic point to a wanderwort, possibly of Afro-Asiatic provenance.” Bjørn cites these comparanda, neither of which has anything corresponding to the PS *ḳ. PIE *dh : PS *t also isn’t very convincing. Also, the word does not mean ‘sweet’ in PIE (that would be *sueh2d-), just ‘mead’ and/or ‘honey’—at least, that’s my understanding of it, but Bjørn has written more about this.
9. PIE *dh2p- ‘sacrifice, feast’, PS *ðabḥ- ‘sacrifice, slaughter’. The metathesis increases the chance of a coincidental match, but otherwise this one is nice. It would be annoying to bring up Zulu hlaba ‘to stab, slaughter, sacrifice’.
10. PIE *dhoHn- ‘grain’, PS *duḫn– ‘millet’. This one looks great! No notes. If related, the direction of borrowing is ambiguous.
11. PIE *gwrH-n- ‘quern, millstone’, PS *gurn- ‘threshing floor’. The PIE *-n- is normally taken to be a nominal suffix so the word can be related to *gwrh2-u- ‘heavy’, but Bjørn suggests folk etymology in PIE. That would also explain why the PKIE laryngeal finds no counterpart in PS. Still, “the comparison between PIE and PS suffers from discontinuous semantics” (in other words: a quern is not a threshing floor).
12. PIE *kleh2-u- ‘lock, key, bolt’, PS *klʔ ‘to retain, detain’. As Bjørn writes, “[t]he semantic match is not immaculate”. PIE *h2 : PS *ʔ is not so intuitive either.
13. PIE *(s)teuros, *tauros (with *a!) ‘bull’, PS *θawr- ‘bull, ox’. “The European reflexes of *tauros are uniform to a degree that suggests a late (dialectal) distribution”. The originality of the Semitic form is based on Militarev & Kogan identifying Afroasiatic cognates, which are not presented.
14. (P)IE *ghaid- ‘goat kid’, PS *gady-. Pretty nice. As with ‘bull’, the form (*a!) and distribution suggest a late loanword. Bjørn also brings in Proto-Berber *a-ɣăyd, which matches the Indo-European forms even better (note that PB *ɣ probably corresponds to PS *ḳ, not *g).
15. (P)IE *lāp- ‘calf, cow’, PS *ʔalp– ‘bovine’. This one is piggybacking on the credentials of the previous two *a-nimals, which have similar distributions.
16. (P)IE *bhar-(s-) ‘grain, barley’, PS *bVrr- ‘grain, wheat’. Pretty good: *barr- with an *a is reflected in Hebrew, and the simplification of the *rr to *r is expected in Indo-European.
17. PIE *h2eǵ–ro-s ‘field’. The Semitic is a bit of a mess here: a PS reconstruction *ḫagar- is based on a Ge’ez form that can’t descend from it (hagar with h) and an Aramaic form that doesn’t exist (haǧar with h and a ǧ that doesn’t exist in premodern Aramaic; haḡar doesn’t exist either). This last one appears to be based on a misinterpretation of Leslau’s note “Ar[abic] ([of] Dat[ina]) haǧar village in ruins”. As Ge’ez hagar means ‘city’ etc., not ‘field’ either, I don’t understand where this *ḫagar ‘arable field’ is coming from.
18. PIE *h2endh– ‘flower’, PS *ḥinṭ– ‘wheat’. The Semitic etymon is well attested, but the Indo-European one seems spurious (‘marshgrass’, ‘flower’, ‘arable field’, ‘soma plant’… are all of these related?). The formal correspondence is pretty nice, apart from PIE *dh : PS *ṭ.
19. PIE *ǵlh3(o)u- ‘sister-in-law’, PS *kall-at- ‘bride, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law’ (Arabic kannat- has that last meaning; thanks, Marijn!). Citing earlier publications of his, he states that “the term should … be considered a Wanderwort tied to marriage and alliance strategies defying linguistic and cultural barriers”. This sounds exciting but I find the forms pretty different.
20. (P)IE *h1is(h2)-u- ‘arrow’, PS *ḥVθ̣θ̣– (not “*ḥiθ̣w-“) ‘arrow’. The *w in Bjørn’s PS reconstruction must be based on Classical Arabic ḥað̣w-at- ‘small (headless) arrow used for practice’, ‘twig’. Without it, there’s hardly any resemblance between the IE and PS words.
21. (P)IE *peleḱu– ‘axe’, PS *plḳ ‘to split apart’. The semantics are nice but the *-e-e- vocalism would look as strange in PS as it does in Indo-European.

Evaluation

So what have we got?

• ‘seven’ has the same meaning in both families, is formally similar, and has linguistic arguments supporting a borrowing from Semitoid to PIE.
• ‘grain’/’millet’ is semantically and formally very close, with no reason to see either family as the source.
• ‘star’/’Venus’ is formally very close, with the semantics making IE more likely as the source than Semitoid.
• ‘eagle’ and ‘horn’ have formal reasons to see IE as the source, not the recipient (if the Semitic words are even related).
• ‘six’, ‘mead’/’sweet’, ‘quern’/’threshing floor’, ‘bolt’/’to detain’, ‘flower’/’wheat’, ‘sister-in-law’, and ‘axe’/’to split’ all have formal and/or semantic mismatches or problems increasing the chance that they just look similar by accident.
• ‘cow’, ‘eight’, ‘field’, and ‘arrow’ lack a convincing Semitic counterpart. Bringing in other branches of Afroasiatic (which have massively different lexicons!) greatly increases the chance of a coincidental match, especially when we allow for diagonal comparisons like ‘eight’ : ‘four’ and ‘cow’ : ‘class of bull’.

Most interestingly:

• ‘bull’ and ‘grain, barley’/’wheat’ both show a very close formal resemblance; allowing for metathesis, so do ‘calf’/’bovine’ and ‘goat kid’, and maybe ‘sacrifice’. Most of these cannot go back to Proto-Indo-European due to the presence of an *a (rare or non-existent in PIE). Whether ‘sacrifice’ is PIE depends on the identification of possible reflexes in Hittite and Tocharian. Notably, the forms with *a are all limited to European languages, and these words all belong to the same, agricultural semantic field.

Two strong examples and three weak ones isn’t a lot to base a whole account of European prehistory on, but I think this last category could point to post-PIE borrowings from Semitic or something close to it, which is a cool finding! For the rest, with just one word that is more likely to have been borrowed from Semitic into PIE than vice versa and one that could go either way, I don’t think there’s sufficient evidence to say that there are Semitoid loans in Proto-Indo-European proper. The two possible examples should be attributed to chance resemblance.

Coincidence, really?

I want to finish with a note on this last point, chance resemblance. Can it really be a coincidence that ‘seven’ is *septm in PIE and *tsabʕ-at-Vm in PS; that ‘grain’ is *dhoHn- in PIE and ‘millet’ is *duḫn– in PS; and so forth, if you want to include more examples? Well… yes. Depending on how many of the comparanda you find close enough to consider them being related, we could just be dealing with the couple of words that end up looking similar and having similar meanings in any two languages you compare. In the case at hand, this risk of coincidence is increased because Bjørn isn’t very strict when identifying formal matches. For example, PIE had (at least) three laryngeals: guttural sounds of unknown realization, labeled *h1, *h2, and *h3. *H means “one of these three but we can’t tell which one”. PS, on the other hand, had six guttural sounds: uvular *ḫ and *ġ, pharyngeal *ḥ and *ʕ, and glottal *h and *ʔ. Bjørn is OK with any of these matching each other:

It’s also fine for a laryngeal or guttural to be present in either language with nothing matching it in the other, as with *septm/*tsabʕ-, *(H)oḱtoH (is this a suffix?)/*okkuz, *lāp-/*ʔalp-, and *ǵlh3(o)u-/*kall-at-. That means that we can increase our forms that would count as a match: PIE *dhoHn– would match all of the following:

• *duḫn–
• *duġn–
• *duḥn–
• *duʕn–
• *duhn–
• *duʔn–
• *dunn–

Moreover, PIE has three series of stops: voiceless, voiced, and voiced aspirated. PS has similar triads of voiceless, voiced, and ejective stops, affricates, and fricatives. These, too, can mix and match:

So we can expand our list of acceptable PS matches for PIE *dhoHn-; this now includes:

• *tuḫn–
• *tuġn–
• *tuḥn–
• *tuʕn–
• *tuhn–
• *tuʔn–
• *tunn–
• *duḫn–
• *duġn–
• *duḥn–
• *duʕn–
• *duhn–
• *duʔn–
• *dunn–
• *ṭuḫn–
• *ṭuġn–
• *ṭuḥn– (this root means ‘to grind’, as in tahini! Semantically close enough to match ‘grain’, right?)
• *ṭuʕn–
• *ṭuhn–
• *ṭuʔn–
• *ṭunn–

We’ve increased the odds of getting a match by coincidence by 21 times, and have indeed found another match in the root *ṭḥn ‘to grind’.1 So if we really want to consider how likely it is that these similarities between PIE and PS are coincidental, we should ask ourselves how likely it is for one match as nice as *dhoHn-/*duḫn– to occur by chance, and then multiply that chance by 21. Would we really expect this to happen through sheer chance? In my view: yes, we totally should.

1. This is only made worse by allowing for metathesis of the second and third consonant: now we have 40 options. Allowing for an additional final consonant corresponding to nothing, as in *medhu-/*mtḳ, multiplies the chance by a factor of 27 or so, taking some root co-occurrence restrictions into account. That would give us 1080 potential matches, although these wouldn’t all look as nice as *dhoHn-/*duḫn-. ↩︎

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/11/13/bjorn-old-european-afro-asiatic/

#Afroasiatic #Akkadian #Arabic #Aramaic #Berber #Egyptian #GeEz #Hebrew #IndoEuropean #linguistics #NECaucasian #news #Omotic #ProtoSemitic #Sumerian

While reviewing proofs for an article that should appear soon, it struck me that the shape ordinal numerals like ‘third’, ‘fourth’, ‘fifth’ take in Semitic provides some evidence for subgrouping that I don’t think I’ve seen before. Quick recap: most scholars today accept something like the following family tree for Semitic, as compellingly presented by Huehnergard & Rubin (2011).

I’m generally skeptical about West Semitic as a group because I think everyone’s favourite West Semitic innovation, the *qatala perfect, may be a retention from Proto-Semitic. But among some other innovations (I particularly like relative/demonstrative *θū > *ðū), this subgroup is supported by the shape of the ordinals. Akkadian has a *CaCuC– pattern, as in:

• Old Babylonian šaluš– ‘third’, rebu– < *rabuʕ– ‘fourth’, ḫamuš– ‘fifth’
• Old Assyrian rabū-t-um ‘the fourth (f.)’, rabū-ni ‘our fourth witness’, ḫamuš-ni ‘our fifth witness’

In West Semitic, the normal ordinal has a different, *CāCiC- pattern, as in:

• Classical Arabic θāliθ-, rābiʕ-, ḫāmis-
• Ge’ez śaləs, rabəʕ, ḫaməs
• Mehri (Modern South Arabian) śōləθ, rōbaʕ, ḫōməs
• probably also Sabaic θlθ, rbʕ, ḫms; Ugaritic θlθ, rbʕ, ḫmš…

In the rest of Northwest Semitic, one trace of this pattern might be found if the consonantal spelling tltʔ in Daniel 5:16 (Biblical Aramaic) stands for *tālítā ‘as the third one’ (Suchard 2022: 224). Otherwise, Aramaic and Canaanite have a different pattern: *CaCīC– followed by the nisbe suffix, which has a special shape in Aramaic. Examples:

• Biblical Hebrew šlīšī, rḇīʕī, ḥămiššī (probably influenced by šiššī ‘sixth’, itself a new formation for expected **šḏīšī)
• Syriac tliṯoy, rbiʕoy, ḥmišoy

So, we have three patterns: *CaCuC-, *CāCiC-, and *CaCīC–īy/āy-. Which one is oldest and which ones are innovative?

Interestingly, Ge’ez and Modern South Arabian both have a special set of numerals that specifically refer to periods of time like days:

• Ge’ez śälus, räbuʕ, ḫämus
• Mehri śīləθ, rība, ḫayməh

In the article I’m proofreading, I argue these can all be reconstructed as *CaCuC-. This also matches Biblical Hebrew ʕāśōr ‘tenth (day)’ and may be related to dialectal Arabic names for the days of a the week like ʔaθ-θalūθ and ʔar-rabūʕ (borrowed from Sabaic???). This matches the Akkadian pattern for the normal numerals, which also happens to be attested with reference to a period of time in Old Assyrian ḫamuš-t-um. It’s more likely for an old formation to be preserved in a specialized use like referring to numbers of days than for something specific like that to be generalized for ordinals in all contexts. *CāCiC– also has an obvious origin, as this is the productive pattern for active participles and we can imagine a kind of shift from ‘being third’ as a participle to ‘third’ as an ordinal. So in terms of innovations, this looks like:

1. Proto-Semitic: *CaCuC- (preserved in East Semitic/Akkadian)
2. Proto-West-Semitic: innovates *CāCiC-, preserves *CaCuC- for counting days etc.

*CaCīC–īy/āy– is so restricted that it is most attractive to see this as a late innovation shared by Canaanite and Aramaic. If so, that would support Pat-El & Wilson-Wright’s (2018; paywalled?) argument on other grounds that these two families form a subgroup within Northwest Semitic.

1. Proto-Aramaeo-Canaanite or Aramaic and Canaanite as an areal grouping: innovate(s) *CaCīC–īy/āy-, cleans up *CāCiC– with remarkable efficiency

An intermediate *CaCīC– pattern without the nisbe suffix added might be attested in Biblical Hebrew šālīš, which not only means ‘one-third (of some unknown measure)’ but is also a military rank that has traditionally been explained as the ‘third man’ on a chariot besides the primary warrior and the driver.

This pattern also forms fractions in Aramaic, as in Imperial Aramaic rbyʕ and Syriac rbiʕ-t-o ‘quarter’. So maybe we should see the pre-Aramaeo-Canaanite development as a shift from still very active-participle-y *CāCiC– to more productively adjectival *CaCīC-, with the extra adjectival nisbe suffix being added later for good measure. Maybe that last step took place after the ordinals had started to shift in meaning to fractions (which are nouns, not adjectives), giving something like *rabīʕ–īy– an original literal meaning like ‘quarter-y’.

In conclusion, an ordinals-based family tree ends up looking like this:

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/11/03/ordinal-numerals-as-shared-innovations-in-semitic/

#Akkadian #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic

Kossmann & Suchard (2018) suggest that an ancestor of both Berber and Semitic had a verbal system where a stative like *yilmad ‘he is learnèd’ contrasted with a perfective like *yalmud or *yalmid ‘he learned’. The stative use of the *yiCCaC form is still common in Berber and retained in two Akkadian verbs, ‘to know’ and ‘to have’. Our idea is that in both families, this stative developed a perfect meaning (‘he has learned’, also still current in Berber) and that in Semitic, this further developed into a perfective, with some verbs now forming the perfective with the inherited *yaCCu/iC and others with the newly perfective *yiCCaC.

A whole bunch of ancient Semitic languages attest names with *yVCCVC verbs as the first element and the name of a god as the second element. Normally we take these verbs as the Proto-Semitic perfective. But I wonder whether they might not also preserve the intermediate, perfect meaning. For *yismaʕ-ʔilum (Ishmael), for example, ‘God has heard’ seems like a more sensible meaning than ‘God heard [at some unspecified point in time]’. Israel makes more sense as ‘God has established his rule’; Jacob makes more sense as ‘[God] has protected’; Joseph as ‘[God] has added [to our family]’; and so forth.

Since this type of name is attested in both West and East Semitic (e.g. ‘Dagan (has?) heard’), there’s no issue with reconstructing it for Proto-Semitic and maybe beyond, so it’s possible that it retains a pre-Proto-Semitic perfect use of the *yiCCaC. The use of *yaCCuC and *yaCCiC forms like *yaʕqub (again, Jacob) and *yantin is unexpected, though: as per Kossmann & Suchard, these should have been perfective for as long as we can tell. I guess that either the use of the Proto-Semitic perfective in names of this type was extended based on the model of *yiCCaC verbs like *yismaʕ ‘he heard’ (in names: ‘he has heard’), or Kossmann & Suchard have some more thinking to do.

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/10/31/stative-yvccvc-and-personal-names/

#Akkadian #Berber #Bible #Hebrew #linguistics #ProtoSemitic