Abstract
The Hebrew phenomenon commonly known as Pretonic Lengthening (PL), whereby an originally short open-syllabic vowel immediately preceding the stressed syllable may appear as long, has for the most part been considered a quite late development in the history of the language, whether viewed as a genuine sound change, or as an artificial by-product of synagogal cantillation by Aramaic-speaking Jews. This paper will attempt to show that a late date for PL is untenable (?2.1) and will argue that PL occurred quite early in the history of Hebrew, early enough in fact to have antedated the reduction or elision of unstressed open-syllabic short vowels, which Hebrew shares with Aramaic (?2.2). The attempt will also be made to reconcile this early date for PL within NW Semitic historical dialectology in terms of a wave-theoretical model of linguistic change (?3).
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