wayyish'al Yig'al >But as long as we are on the subject, do we have any evidence of the "weak" BGDKPT in Aramaic, beside those texts that the Masoretes dealt with. In other words, is there any evidence of this in any Aramaic dialect, besides the Aramaic of the Bible? How would we know, lacking nikkud?
Ironically, it is actually Aramaic where we have good ancient evidence. systematically, Aramaic of the early/mid First Temple period had words that etymologically line up with 'th' and 'dh' (interdental fricatives) as evidenced in Arabic and Ugaritic. Those words were spelled with shin and zayin in that period, e.g., yashub 'he will return'. However, at the end of the First Temple period Aramaic texts start spelling the same set of etymological interdentals with tav and dalet. So words like *yashub become spelled ytwb and *zahab becomes dahab. The linguistic explanation that explains this is that 'sh' and 'z' were graphs that were chosen for writing 'th' and 'dh' sounds. However, during the First Temple period Aramaic developed fricativization with simple stops following vowels. So the 't' phoneme became pronounced as 'th' post-vocalically, otherwise 't'; 'd' became 'dh' postvocalically, otherwise 'd'. Consequently, the words with phonemic 'th' and 'dh' were realigned in speakers' minds as allonphones of 't' and 'd', so that a word like early 'thub' "to return" (written 'shub') became to be spoken as 'tub' and thus written with tav. This happened across the board with all of the words that were etymologically interdental fricatives so that we can state that by Jeremiah's time the Aramaic language had developed 'begedkefet' allophons and these remained constant in the language ever since, with the spelling regularizing during the Second Temple period to reflect the new sound system. that is, for some time people would write with the old spelling system, a 'historical spelling', even though the referential sound of the word had changed. Note that Jer 10.11 has the די di spelling for etymological 'dhi' "that, because; of" yet shows historical spelling with ארקא 'earth' while also using his contemporary 'modern' ארעא. (Historical spelling is similar to English writing "through" [thru] even though [sic, tho] we have dropped the velar fricative ending centuries ago.) This explanation, of course, covers attested Aramaic inscriptions and records from the 9thC BCE through the 1stC BCE and is not limited to Biblical Aramaic or the MT. -- Randall Buth, PhD www.biblicalulpan.org [email protected] Biblical Language Center Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
