dear isaac, as a non-specialist i made a small search on the internet and found some material on the phenomenon called gemination which includes all the dgeshim in all the languages. there is fascinating stuff on the development of gemination in akkadian and later in other semitic languages.
just a small example: in tigrinya, SEBERE is (as expected) to break. the repetitive form of SEBERE is SEBABERE, repeating the B twice. the closest in hebrew would be the piel: $YBR with (yes) dagesh. so, dagesh is indeed related to doubling and undoubling of consonants, that is, unless you reject all extra-hebrew ties. this is connected with the D-stem gemination in semitic which is documented already in akkadian. conjecture: in proto-semitic repetition was expressed by repeating the word: $BR-$BR. by assimilation, this was shortened to SB-BR, then a clever person invented the dagesh. it seems that the dagesh in hebrew was originally used for BGD-KFT only, where it is really absoluely necessary. then later diverted for other uses (gemination). gemination in canaanite would make it even more natural to accept its existence in biblical hebrew. unfortunately i did not find easy access to written material on canaanite, except for some video tapes on the verb system. but i am sure canaanite also had geminaion and D-stem. Rainey wrote some books on canaanite, and so did NJC Kouwenberg and E Lipinski. these last two books are available (in mutilated but usable form) on the internet. maybe a specialist on the b-hebrew can explain the issue further. nir cohen _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
