Rhotic Phonemes in Semitic Languages – The Case of Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew

What it is about

A comparison of two Proto-Semitic sounds counted as rhotics, the trill /r/ and the fricative /ġ/, in conservative Classical Arabic and innovative Biblical Hebrew. /r/ survives in both; in Hebrew it later patterned with the gutturals (no doubling), while Greek and Latin transcriptions show it could still be doubled in the biblical period. /ġ/ is kept in Arabic (probably uvular) but in Hebrew merged with /ʿ/ (ע) by about the 3rd century BCE; the Septuagint shows the old split (Γάζα for עַזָּה with gamma, but Βαλααμ for בִּלְעָם with a vowel). Matching 259 Hebrew ע-roots with Arabic cognates, the author identifies 216, of which 30 are homonyms; restoring them gives 246 roots, about 24% with original /ġ/. Words from /ġ/-roots are rare (98 lexemes, a third hapax) and gather in a few, mostly post-exilic, books.

Ideas

I1. For the Torah dictionary: tag ע-roots with their Proto-Semitic value (/ʿ/ or /ġ/) where a cognate is clear, and split homonymous entries that the merger created (the paper's example is עֲוִילִים "unjust ones" vs "young boys").
I2. Use Septuagint transcriptions of names (gamma for ע) as a cheap test for /ġ/ in Torah names: עַזָּה, עֲמֹרָה (Γόμορρα), and check them against the list.
I3. A phonology note: ר behaves as a guttural in Tiberian vocalisation (compensatory lengthening, no dagesh) but not in older transcriptions; give counts of ר + dagesh in the Torah (a handful of exceptions).

For Mova

I1 is a column and a split rule for the dictionary builder (languages/hbo/10-lexicon.md, homonyms). I2 and I3 go into languages/hbo/03-phonology.md (gutturals and resh, historical sound changes). I3 is a quick count on the trees' forms; the yetzirah crate's letter tables may cite ע's double history as a note.

Institutions

🎓Jagiellonian UniversityKrakow ·

Poland2 works · 235 citations

Topics Hebrew & Aramaic Semitic languages

Cite

Cite as Bartosz Pietrzak. 2018. Rhotic Phonemes in Semitic Languages – The Case of Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew. Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature.

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17951/lsmll.2018.42.1.33

@article{pietrzak2018rhotic,
  title = {{Rhotic Phonemes in Semitic Languages – The Case of Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew}},
  author = {Bartosz Pietrzak},
  journal = {Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.17951/lsmll.2018.42.1.33},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17951/lsmll.2018.42.1.33}
}

References

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