On Thu, 28 Oct 2010 08:02:35 +0200, Yigal Levin <[email protected]> wrote: > Kevin, > > I apologize if I misconstrued what you wrote. I actually didn’t see your > post. I may have missed it, or you may have inadvertently sent it to Jim > instead of to the list (happens to me a lot). 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?
There's the evidence of Syriac, which uses diacritics similar in function to daghesh/raphe. Since the "weak" forms of BGDKPT occur in situations very similar to BH/BA, I think it can be regarded as corroborating that the spirantization is characteristic of Aramaic in general. The question is whether Hebrew and Aramaic developed the phenomenon together as a result of their close relationship and and physical proximity, or whether the Hebrew development is a direct result of Aramaic influence (speaking Hebrew with an Aramaic accent, as it were). > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] > [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kevin Riley > Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2010 6:44 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Dagesh > > If you read the complete text of what I wrote, rather than Jim's > condensed version, I wasn't saying that doubling was unique, but that > lenition of the begadkepat letters was. I suspect one reason why > lenition does not occur (as far as we know) in the other languages is > because they kept the fricatives from Proto-Semitic, and that would > block any weakening of ptkbdg. The only connection I made between > doubling and lenition was that the dagesh used to indicate doubling > could also indicate non-lenition in the cases where a single consonant > was not lenited, possibly because length ceased to be phonemic. -- William Parsons _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
