#proto-semitic — Public Fediverse posts

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

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

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

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

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