Phonological Adaptation and the Biblical Aramaic and Biblical Hebrew Reflexes of *i and *u

Benjamin D Suchard

doi:10.11647/obp.0207.05

Abstract

Benjamin Suchard treats the phenomenon of irregular reflexes of the vowels *i and *u in Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic from a novel perspective of ‘phonological adaptation’, whereby speakers of one language adapted borrowed forms to their own phonology. This process is known to be irregular. The author makes an innovative suggestion that in Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic, respectively, the irregular reflexes of the vowels *i and *u are due to the phonological adaptation of pre-Tiberian Hebrew to Aramaic phonology and of Biblical Hebrew to Palestinian Greek phonology. Such a process sheds light on general developments in the reading traditions and linguistic realities of Palestine of late antiquity.

Highlights

Historical linguists have been guided by the Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze, the principle that sound changes affecting a language are phonetically regular and exceptionless, as put forward by the nineteenth-century German philologists and linguists known as the Neogrammarians
If we speak of the consistent operation of sound laws, this can only mean that a sound change will treat every individual case in which the same phonetic conditions present themselves within the same dialect in the same fashion
Beyond Semitic, we find a final candidate in Palestinian Greek, the phonology of which has been admirably described by Benjamin Kantor (2017)

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Historical linguists have been guided by the Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze, the principle that sound changes affecting a language are phonetically regular and exceptionless, as put forward by the nineteenth-century German philologists and linguists known as the Neogrammarians. Where one and the same sound formerly occurred, this must either stay the same sound in the later stages of development as well, or, where a split into several different sounds has taken place, a specific cause should be indicated which explains why this sound arose in one case and that sound in the other, and this cause should be purely phonetic in nature, such as the influence of surrounding sounds, stress, syllable structure, etc.1 Adhering to this principle has pushed linguists beyond merely identifying tendencies operating in a certain language and allowed them to discover phonetically conditioned sound changes that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. As the regularity of sound change is a universal principle, it can be shown to apply to Biblical Hebrew (Suchard 2019) In this language, we are faced with a small number of phenomena. Phonological adaptation can be held responsible for both of these irregularities: adaptation of Aramaic texts to Hebrew phonology in the first case and adaptation of the biblical reading tradition to the phonology of an unidentified language, possibly Greek, in the second case

PHONEMES AND ALLOPHONES

BIBLICAL ARAMAIC I : E AND U : O

BIBLICAL HEBREW AND BIBLICAL ARAMAIC I : Ɛ AND U : Ɔ

CONCLUSION