Language:
English
Year of publication:
2018
Titel der Quelle:
Hebrew Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
59 (2018) 39-64; 60 (2020) 7-37
Keywords:
Hebrew language, Biblical Morphology
;
Hebrew language, Biblical Suffixes and prefixes
Abstract:
This article is the first half of a study, continued in the next volume of Hebrew Studies. The 3 m. sg. pronominal suffix on plural nouns is realized in several allomorphs in Classical Hebrew: in early Hebrew inscriptions, the suffix appears as 〈-W〉 and perhaps as 〈-YH〉; in Biblical Hebrew, it usually appears as 〈-YW〉 (sometimes emended from 〈-W〉 in instances of Masoretic Qere readings), and occasionally as 〈-YHW〉 in poetic texts. In this study we provide a unified and principled linguistic account of these textual data, tracing the various phonological developments of the 3 m. sg. genitive suffix on plural nouns, and relating these phonological developments to the phonetic causes underlying them. After analyzing the phonological realizations of the high vocoids *U (/w/ and /u/) and * Y (/y/ and /i/) and of *H (found in the third-person pronominal morphemes), we identify three stages of development that produced the 〈-Y-〉 in Biblical Hebrew: (1) the linkage of the number-gender morpheme to a single slot in the skeletal tier (effectively yielding an early diphthong contraction *-aI 〉 ē); (2) the deletion of *H in selected environments defined by accent and the surrounding vowels; and (3) the phonetically-motivated insertion of the glide *y in the hiatus environment [-e:w:].
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