New paper on ordinals

This blog post is now a paper, which came out unexpectedly soon: ‘Ordinal Numerals as a Criterion for Subclassification: The Case of Semitic’.

Abstract: This article explores how ordinal numerals (like first, second and third) can help classify languages, focusing on the Semitic language family. Ordinals are often formed according to productive derivational processes, but as a separate word class, they may retain archaic morphology that is otherwise lost from the language. Together with the high propensity of ‘first’ and, less frequently, ‘second’ to be formed through suppletion, this makes them highly valuable for diachronic linguistic analysis. The article identifies four main patterns of ordinal formation across different Semitic languages. Together with innovations in the lowest two ordinals, these can be correlated with more and less accepted subgroupings within Semitic as a whole. Concretely, they offer support for the widely accepted West Semitic, Northwest Semitic and Abyssinian (Ethio-Semitic) clades as well as the recently proposed Aramaeo-Canaanite clade and provide new evidence for the further subclassification of Abyssinian that matches other recent proposals. However, no evidence was found to support the debated Central Semitic or South Semitic groupings. Given the accurate identification of accepted subgroupings and high level of detail, this approach holds promise for the classification of other language families, especially where other linguistic data are scarce.

Enjoy!

#Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #news #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic

Reconstructing the Modern South Arabian dual endings

One of the many lovable features of the Modern South Arabian languages is their productive retention of the dual, in nouns, pronouns, and verbs (all persons). Some examples from Omani Mehri (Rubin 2018):

• ġáygi ṯrōh ‘two men’, contrast ġayg ‘man’ (in practice, dual nouns are nearly always followed by the numeral ‘two’)
• perfect bǝg(ǝ)dōh, bǝgǝdtōh ‘the two of them (m./f.) chased’, contrast singular bǝgūd, bǝg(ǝ)dūt and plural bǝgáwd, bǝgūd
• imperfect yǝbǝgdōh, tǝbǝgdōh ‘the two of them (m./f.) chase’, contrast singular yǝbūgǝd, tǝbūgǝd and plural yǝbǝ́gdǝm, tǝbǝ́gdǝn
• independent pronoun hay ‘the two of them’, contrast singular hē ‘he’, sē ‘she’, plural hēm, sēn ‘they (m./f.)’

Let’s look at some reconstructions.

The verb

The verbal dual ending can be reconstructed for Proto-Modern-South-Arabian as *-óh, but its deeper Semitic origin has not been explained. Dufour (2022: 77) writes:

The suffix for the dual in verbs is stressed in MSA (stable in Soqotri). It is unclear what etymon should be posited for it. Akkadian and Classical Arabic have -ā, but such an etymon would not fit the MSA forms since, as we have seen, final vowels drop in Proto-MSA (cf. the exactly identical *-ā suffix marking 3fp in the perfect: Ga *ḳadarā> OMh. ḳədū́r, J./ Ś. ḳɔdɔ́r). On the other hand, Epigraphic South Arabian attests verbal dual suffixes written with a /y/, though what this orthography stands for is unclear. Perhaps we should therefore posit *-ay or *-āy.

Both of these reconstructions run into problems, but I think we can solve those issues by combining both options and reconstructing *-ayā. Consider the following:

First, the final *-h is probably automatically added to a stressed final vowel, or at least to *-ó(h). Rubin discusses this in his § 2.2.4.

How do we get a stressed word-final vowel? Shouldn’t word-final vowels be lost, as Dufour states? Well, if we reconstruct *-ayā, then the first of those two vowels isn’t word-final. Modern South Arabian stress is super weird, but the main rule (for words containing a Proto-West-Semitic low vowel) is pretty much: stress the last, non-word-final *a or *ā. In a reconstructed form like 3m.du. perfect *bagad-ayā, that gives us *bagad-áyā, with the stress in the right part of the word: the suffix.

Next, we have to assume that *-áyā contracts to *-ó(h). *a turns to Proto-Modern-South-Arabian *o most of the time, so this just means loss of an intervocalic glide, something I don’t mind at all. In fact, there’s MSAL-internal evidence for almost exactly the same change. III-y verbs, like *bakay–a ‘he wept’, show up in MSAL as *bokóh (> OMehri bǝkōh). Before suffixes, these verbs retain their y, like OMehri tǝwōh ‘he ate’, tǝwyǝ́h ‘he ate it (m.)’. And, what do you know, so do the duals: “sǝbṭáys ‘they (two) hit her’; śǝnyáyǝh ‘they (two) saw him’”.

The difference in stress in the suffixed forms here is interesting. The 3m.sg. form tǝwy-ǝ́h shows a stressed suffix, part of a paradigm that is only used on the 3m.sg. and 3f.pl. perfects. These are exactly the forms that are reconstructed as ending in a low vowel, *-a and *-ā, respectively (explaining why the vowel right before the suffix is stressed).

Does this show that the 3du. forms did not end in *ā? Maybe. But maybe not. In Jibbali, the stressed object suffixes only occur on the 3m.sg., not on the 3f.pl. (Rubin 2014). As vowel length doesn’t usually play a role in MSAL vowel changes, this is probably due to analogy, the 3f.pl. taking the unstressed suffixes that are used everywhere else in the verb. In the same way, these suffixes could have spread to the 3du., also in Mehri where they didn’t make it to the 3f.pl. So, we could reconstruct the 3m.du. perfect forms as follows:

The numeral

The number ‘two (m.)’ has what looks like the same ending, as we saw in Omani Mehri ṯrōh. Should we reconstruct this in the same way? I don’t think so; we can get there without the triphthong. Based, in fact, on evidence from Modern South Arabian in particular, this is one of the words where we should probably reconstruct a word-initial consonant cluster in Proto-Semitic: the ‘two’ stem was probably just *θn-, with no vowel. If we add the dual nominative ending, that gives us *θn-ā. While word-final vowels normally don’t receive the stress in Proto-MSAL, here, it’s the only vowel in the word. So without further ado, we can imagine the development as pre-Proto-MSAL *θn-ā́ > Proto-MSAL *θr-óh > OMehri ṯrōh, etc. It’s really striking that the MSAL form seems to go back to a reconstruction with just an *-ā, just like Akkadian šinā. šinā doesn’t inflect for case (as far as I know), which would explain why we don’t get the expected oblique dual ending *-ay(na) here in Modern South Arabian. Adding this to my list of eerie Akkadian-MSAL isoglosses.

The feminine looks a bit confusing but at first sight I would guess it reconstructs to Proto-MSAL *θrót (e.g. Jibbali ṯrut). This regularly goes back to pre-Proto-MSAL *θn-át-ā; here, the dual ending is in a polysyllable, hence unstressed, and therefore lost.

The noun

Nouns mark the dual with a suffixed -i (mostly lost in Jibbali). Unfortunately, dual nouns can’t take possessive suffixes, so we don’t have any allomorphs to work with. Looking at other languages, I think our best bet for the reconstructed morpheme here is the nominal dual oblique ending *-ay. No nunation or mimation seems to follow (maybe because the numeral ‘two’ is always right behind the noun?). I’m not sure if *-ay should yield Proto-MSAL *-i; it doesn’t seem to in the jussive of III-y verbs.

The pronoun

Here are the forms from Rubin’s grammars, independent and suffixed:

ǝkáy indeed. Mehri gives us some support here for the idea that unstressed *-ay > *-i. Pronouns are generally a pain to reconstruct, because they all influence each other so much. I’ll venture a reconstruction of 2du. as pre-Proto-MSAL *ʔantay, *-kay and 3du. as *say, *-say, wonder out loud what the hell is going on with *k in the first person, and leave it at that.

Summing up

It looks like we can account for the Modern South Arabian dual suffixes by deriving them from *-ay in the noun and probably the pronoun, *-ā in the numeral ‘two’, and *-ayā in the verb. The first two morphemes are pretty much expected as the nominal oblique and nominative endings. For the verbal ending, as Dufour says, usually we’d expect *-ā (or is that too Arabocentric?). That suggests that we’re really looking at a double marking, *-ay-ā, with the dual verb tacking on the nominal oblique (and pronominal) *-ay suffix before the true verbal one. Maybe Old Akkadian, Ancient South Arabian, and Eblaite have some more to add to the story, but for now, this seems double-plus-good to me.

#linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #ProtoSemitic

Biblicizing the Bronze Age

(This is part joke, part mnemonic; do not take it seriously.)

I had some fun aligning Levantine archeological periods with the Hexateuch (Torah + Joshua) and some possible dates in the prehistory of Hebrew. The Middle Bronze = Patriarchs and especially Late Bronze = Israelites in Egypt alignments are pretty standard, but I like how well the third millennium lined up with Genesis 2–11. Period names and dates are mostly drawn from Greenberg (2019; paywall).

(Late) Chalcolithic, ca 4000-3750: Eden

Low inequality, high standard of living. Good times.

Early Bronze, ca 3750-2200: the Antediluvian Age

Early Bronze IA, ca 3750

Expulsion from Eden, beginning of history and the Hebrew calendar. Harder, less prosperous times compared to the preceding Chalcolithic. In the east, city-building Cainites of the Middle Uruk Period bring urban civilization to Elam and Upper Mesopotamia. Breakup of Proto-Semitic.

Early Bronze IB, ca 3300

Birth of Jared. Descent of the Watchers (as per the Book of Enoch) and their teaching of arcane technologies triggers a prosperous golden age. Writing invented.

Early Bronze II, ca 3100

Birth of Methuselah (“Man of the Spear”). Armed conflicts(?) cause massive abandonment of EB I villages and a shift to more defensible, walled hilltop settlements.

Early Bronze III, ca 2850

Death of Adam. Nephilim build the pyramids. God does not like the establishment of the Akkadian Empire (is he anti-Semitic?) and gives them a 120-year warning for the Flood (Gen 6:3). In the Southern Levant: increasing isolation, inequality, continuing construction of fortifications; cities abandoned between 2500 and 2400.

Intermediate Bronze, ca 2200-2000: the Flood

4.2-kiloyear event: severe drought(!) triggers collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt and the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia. Arpachshad, Shelah, Eber. Southern Levant continues in its late EB post-urban state.

Middle Bronze, ca 2000-1550: the Patriarchal Age

Middle Bronze I, ca 2000

Tower of Babel built in the days of Peleg. Completion of the Great Ziggurat of Ur, Etemenniguru, “The House Whose Foundation Creates Terror”, commissioned by Ur-Nammu (Nimrod) ca 2100. Breakup of Proto-Northwest-Semitic.

Middle Bronze II, ca 1800

Birth of Abraham. Beginning of the Amorite Age: Northwest Semitic–speaking dynasties establish themselves from Babylon to the Nile Delta (convenient for travellers from, say, Ur to Haran to Canaan to Egypt). High point of the Levantine city-states. Invention of alphabetic writing?

Middle Bronze III, ca 1650

Birth of Jacob. Hyksos period in Egypt. Separation from MB II is “largely an artifact of historical interpretation” and “archaeologically elusive” (Greenberg 2019: 181).

Late Bronze, ca 1550-1200: the Sojourn in Egypt

Late Bronze I, ca 1550

Birth of Joseph. New Kingdom of Egypt expels Hyksos and starts to assert itself over Canaan. Breakup of Proto-Canaanite.

Late Bronze IIA, ca 1400

Death of Joseph’s generation. Israelites in Egypt grow into a great and mighty people. Egyptian Empire fully controls Canaan. Amarna Letters.

Late Bronze IIB, ca 1300

19th Dynasty in Egypt, oppression of the Israelites. Birth of Moses. Egyptian Empire firmly entrenched in Canaan. Texts from Ugarit.

Transitional Bronze-Iron, ca 1200-1000: Exodus, Joshua, Judges

Exodus, desert wanderings, conquest of Canaan, Judges period; Late Bronze Age Collapse. Israelite settlements appear in the highlands of Cis- and Transjordan, Philistines show up on the southern coastal plain. Oldest Biblical Hebrew. The rise and fall of the New Kingdom (1550–1150) together cover 400 years (Gen 15:13).

After the Hexateuch/Bronze Age, things get even less controversial (apart from one big debate): Iron IB (last 150 years of Greenberg’s TBI) is the period of the Judges/very early monarchy; Iron IIA early flourishing of the kingdom of Israel (pick your dynasty); Iron IIB, properly divided monarchy/rise of Aram-Damascus; Iron IIC, Neo-Assyrian period and peak kingdom of Judah. But at that point, the Bronze Age is half a millennium ago. All in all, I’m just glad I’ll be able to annoy people by referring to the EB as the Antediluvian Bronze Age going forward.

#Amorite #archaeology #Bible #Egyptian #Exodus #Genesis #Hebrew #Joshua #ProtoSemitic

New publications and podcast

Busy year for publications (think that’s it for me this year):

Semitic *ʾilāh- and Hebrew אלהים‎: From plural ‘gods’ to singular ‘God’ (Open Access)

Abstract: The Biblical Hebrew word אלהים‎ is plural in form. Semantically and syntactically, however, it can be plural or singular. The stem of this noun can be reconstructed as * ʾilāh-. As already noted by Wellhausen, this looks like a broken plural of *ʾil-, the Proto-Semitic word for ‘god’. This article takes Wellhausen’s observation and uses it to explain the plural morphology of Hebrew אלהים‎. I argue that *ʾilāh- should be reconstructed with redundant plural suffixes in some parts of the paradigm. This reconstructed paradigm is preserved virtually unchanged in Archaic Biblical Hebrew. The reconstructed paradigm also explains the almost complete replacement of *ʾil- by *ʾilāh- in Aramaic and Arabic and allows us to reassess the reasons for the association between the lexeme ‘god’ and plural number. Consequently, earlier suggestions that see אלהים‎’s plural number as a reflection of pre-Yahwistic polytheism or as a marker of abstractness are no longer tenable.

The varying size of the Sodom coalition in Genesis 14 (in FS Tigchelaar; email me for a PDF)

Trying my hardest to find something that might interest newly retired KU Leuven professor Eibert Tigchelaar, I used some Dead Sea Scrolls and other Second Temple literature as well as other textual and linguistic evidence to seek for order in the number of kings on Sodom’s side in Gen 14. Turns out that this closely aligns with other indications of different layers in this fascinating chapter: one about a local raid, one that may be a reworking of a lost epic, and a third one building on the combination of the first two. If you understand Dutch (or want to practice!), also check out this brand new episode of Timo Epping’s Oudheid, all about this question.

#AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #Bible #Canaanite #GeEz #Genesis #Hebrew #Hosea #linguistics #news #Phoenician #ProtoSemitic

Update on Mehri goats

Earlier today, I wrote:

PS *ʕVnz- ‘she-goat’ > Mehri, Harsusi wōz, Jibbali oz, Soqotri o’oz (? but then where did the *ʕ go?)

It just struck me that this is one of the lexically determined words that take ḥ- as the definite article in Mehri and Harsusi, at least. Many of these words used to start with a *ʔ—like M. ḥa-ynīθ ‘women’!—but not all of them; Rubin (2018) mentions some kinship terms where it’s analogical, for instance.

The word for ‘goat’ also happens to have a suppletive plural; from memory, that’s ḥə-rawn. This is probably one of the words where the shape of the article is due to original presence of *ʔ-: Rubin compares Syriac arn-o ‘mountain goat’.

Suppose the singular is from *ʕVnᵈz– and it took the ḥ-article by analogy with the plural. That means we might expect something like *ḥ–ʕōz for ‘the she-goat’. With two pharyngeals in a row, this would be a great environment for the *ʕ to be lost, yielding the attested form, ḥ–ōz. The indefinite form, wōz, would then in turn have been formed by analogy with the definite form. IMHO, this shores up the derivation from *ʕVnᵈz– and supports loss of *n directly before another consonant in an ancestor of the MSAL (provided we can make it work for Jibbali and Soqotri as well).

#Aramaic #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #ProtoSemitic

‘Woman’ in Modern South Arabian, Amorite, and Ugaritic

EDIT: Roey Schneider reminds me he probably suggested this idea to me back in 2023! No plagiarism intended.

Some Modern South Arabian languages have a weird-looking word for ‘woman’: Mehri tēθ, Harsusi and Jibbali teθ. The θ makes it look similar to Proto-Semitic *ʔanθ–at-, which underlies Ugaritic a͗θt, Hebrew ʔiššā, Syriac <ʔntt-ʔ> at-o, Akkadian aššat- ‘wife’, etc. The same root also gives Arabic ʔunθ-ay– ‘female’1. But what about that initial t-?

For years, I’ve kind of assumed the Modern South Arabian words also come from something like *ʔanθ–at-, with the first part being lost and *θ-et then metathesizing to *teθ. It’s weird, but it was my best guess. But here’s a new guess I like better.

In late 2022 (paywalled), Andrew George and Manfred Krebernik published what they aptly referred to as “two remarkable vocabularies”, containing what is probably the first known connected text in Amorite, a Northwest Semitic language of the early second millennium BCE. One of the many surprises these texts contain is the word for ‘woman’ (unambiguously written with a Sumerogram in the Akkadian translation), ta-aḫ-ni-šum. Based on comparisons to the Semitic words above and known Amorite/Akkadian spelling conventions, this looks like *taʔnīθ-um, yet another different noun formation from the *ʔ-n-θ root. As I learned from a recent handout byTania Notarius, Ugaritic also attests a form that looks related: ti͗nθt ‘women’, ‘females’, plausibly /tiʔnīθ-āt-u/.

Both of these forms show a t- prefix, part of a pattern that usually forms abstracts—although concrete nouns in this pattern also occur, like Hebrew < Aramaic talmīḏ– ‘student’. And the Amorite, at least, lacks a feminine suffix. So that’s starting to look like our MSAL *teθ. Could this be a full cognate, with *teθ coming from *taʔnīθ-?

That depends on whether we can get rid of the first two radicals, *ʔ and *n. As far as I know, Proto-Semitic *ʔ was regularly lost on the way to Modern South Arabian. So that’s fine. What about *n, is this one of the (surprisingly) many branches of Semitic where it assimilates to following consonants? Let’s check out some likely etyma with *n before a consonant:

• PS *ʔanta ‘you (m.sg.)’ > Mehri, Harsusi hēt, Jibbali hɛt (if this is the right etymon)
• PS *ʔantum ‘you (m.pl.)’ > Mehri ətēm, Harsusi etōm, Jibbali tum, Soqotri ten
• PS *ʕVnz- ‘she-goat’ > Mehri, Harsusi wōz, Jibbali oz, Soqotri o’oz (? but then where did the *ʕ go? [update])

That’s all I’ve got, for now. The plural pronoun looks good, though. Of course, in *taʔnīθ-, the *n isn’t directly before the θ, so why should it assimilate? After assigning the stress to the first *a—a strange, but reliable rule in pre-MSAL—we could imagine something like
*táʔnīθ > *táʔnəθ (vowel reduction) >
*táʔənθ (metathesis) >
*táʔəθθ (assimilation) >
*teθθ (loss of the glottal stop, vowel contraction, MSAL vowel weirdness)
*teθ (degemination—not entirely clear whether this is regular).

Writing it out like that, the non-gemination of the θ (also word-internally, as in the Mehri dual tēθ–i) may also be a problem for assuming a derivation from the *ʔ-n-θ root.2 Still, this is commonly assumed; supporting evidence comes from the plural forms, like Mehri yənīθ, where the n is visible. So, since the t- in *teθ really does look like a prefix, I think Amorite *taʔnīθ- is an exciting form to compare.

#Akkadian #Amorite #Arabic #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #ProtoSemitic #Syriac #Ugaritic

Two new chapters

Earlier this year, two chapters I wrote a while back appeared in print. A third one should come out any moment now and I was waiting to combine all three in a single post, but it’s taking longer than expected, so here they are. Abstracts by (some of) the respective volume editors:

‘The Shape of the Teen Numerals in Central Semitic’ (Open Access)

This study reconstructs the morphology of teen numerals in Central Semitic languages, covering Northwest Semitic, Arabic, and Sabaic. The formation follows a digit-teen order with gender agreement, unlike many other Semitic languages. The digit stems largely align with previous reconstructions, but significant attention is given to the numeral ‘one’, posited as *ʿist-ān- for masculine and *ʿist-ay- for feminine forms, derived from a Proto-Semitic root distinct from the later adjectival *ʾaḥad-. The paper also examines the endings in the teen numerals, showing that the uninflecting *-a likely preserves an ancient feature. The distinct morphology of feminine forms, especially the Northwest Semitic *ʿiśrihi, reflects an innovative feminine suffix *-ihi, also evidenced in Arabic demonstratives. The study concludes that many features of the teen numerals result from both inherited and innovative elements within the linguistic group.

‘Sound Change in the Hebrew Reading Tradition’ (email me for the PDF)

Benjamin D. Suchard’s contribution (…) investigates for Biblical Hebrew “to what degree this corpus retained its phonological independence from the vernacular forms of Hebrew and Aramaic spoken by the people who transmitted it”. The text of the Hebrew Bible was fixed early on, but it does not write vowels and has a simplified spelling also in other respects. On the other hand, vocalizations as codified in the Tiberian reading tradition show that the text of the Hebrew Bible was also orally transmitted. Suchard argues that these vocalizations provide evidence for two categories of sound change affecting the orally transmitted text: vowel changes that also occurred in the (Hebrew or Aramaic) vernacular, and vowel changes that have no parallel in the vernacular. According to Suchard, then, there is evidence that the Hebrew reading tradition resisted vernacular sound changes, and even that it underwent sound changes that did not take place in the vernacular. Suchard proposes that these changes took place while Hebrew was still a spoken language.

#AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #Bible #Hebrew #linguistics #news #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic

Kogan on the Proto-Semitic Sprachraum

At the Rethinking Proto-Semitic workshop, Leonid Kogan mentioned his suggestion of “Canaan” as the point of dispersal of the Semitic languages, published in an Encyclopedia Aethiopica article.1 Since it isn’t available online, I thought I’d share the relevant paragraph, concise and encyclopedic as it is. (Footnotes mine.)

Lexicostatistics suggest that proto-S. disintegrated in the mid-5th millennium B.C. (Militarev 2000: 303).2 The Arabian homeland of Semites, popular in earlier studies (s. references in Henninger 1968: 10),3 does not look attractive today in view of the well-developed agricultural terminology of proto-S. (Aro 1964)4 and the existence of contact lexemes between proto-S. (PS) and proto-Indo-European (PIE *tauro- – PS *ṯawr- ‘bull’, *gwern- ‘millstone’ – *gurn- ‘threshold’,5 *woino- – *wayn- ‘wine’, *Haster- ‘star’ – *ʿaṯtar- ‘astral deity’, Gamkrelidze–Ivanov 1984: 871-76),6 both of which point to a more northern locality (the combination of *dubb- ‘bear’, *riʾm- ‘aurochs’ and *ṯapan- ‘hyrax’ in proto-S. animal vocabulary suggests Phoenicia and Palestine).

#IndoEuropean #linguistics #ProtoSemitic

Rethinking Proto-Semitic

This week, I was stoked to attend a workshop in Marburg, Germany, entitled “Rethinking Proto-Semitic” and organized by profs Stefan Weninger and Michael Waltisberg. Despite some cancellations, the workshop had an amazing lineup of speakers—and a terrific atmosphere. Here’s my summary of the talks.

Leonid Kogan, “What can we learn from Eblaite on Proto-Semitic morphology?” Ongoing study and decipherment of the 24th-century BCE East Semitic language from Ebla, Syria shows the following features that are interesting for reconstruction:

Maria Bulakh, “Intercalated *a as a plural marker in Soqotri and its implications for the reconstruction of Proto-Semitic”. While superficially hard to recognize (and Jorik and I didn’t attempt to in our paper on this subject), reconstruction of Modern South Arabian and especially Soqotri attest insertion of *-a- between the second and third radical of *CVCC- nouns in the plural. No external plural suffix though.

Me, “Rethinking the Proto-Semitic stative”. Slides here. Got some good suggestions for languages where I could go looking for a synchronic distinction between resultative *qatal-a and preterit *ya-qtul.

Ahmad Al-Jallad, “Revisiting the post-verbal morphemes *-u and *-n(V) in Semitic: a proposal for a unified theory”. The different verbal suffixes/enclitics shaped like -u and -n(V) in Akkadian, Central Semitic possibly Modern South Arabian, and Gurage (South Abyssinian) could all descend from the Proto-Semitic *=u(m) locative, which gained various subordinating and durative meanings. Central Semitic *ya-qtul-u instead of *ya-qattal-u for the imperfect could show a collapse in the distinction between *ya-qtul and *ya-qattal related to the rise of the West Semitic perfect *qatal-a.

Michael Waltisberg, “Issues of reconstructive methodology in Semitics”. Based on his review of Rebecca Hasselbach(-Andee)’s 2013 Case in Semitic, Waltisberg discussed some methodological questions like whether our reconstructed Proto-Semitic represents an actually spoken language or just maps correspondences between different languages and whether there is room for dialectal diversity and different chronological stages within a protolanguage. (Prof. Hasselbach-Andee sadly had to cancel her planned attendance.)

Lutz Edzard, “Linguistic divergence and convergence in Arabic and Semitic revisited”. As the most protolanguage-sceptic scholar at the workshop, Edzard reviewed some of his problems with the linear-descent-only family tree model where every language in a family descends from a kind of ancestral singularity with no internal diversity.

Vera Tsukanova, “What can modern Arabic dialects reveal about the etymology of the L-stem in Semitic?” The development of the L-stem (*qātal-) in historical Arabic suggests that it is more likely that this stem originally had a concrete meaning like applicative that was bleached in some languages than that it was originally vague and acquired its specific meaning in pre-Arabic.

Eran Cohen, “Semitic k-based similative particles—comparative and diachronic aspects”. Different Semitic particles starting with k- can be diachronically related to each other according to recognized historical pathways of development.

Na’ama Pat-El, “Homomorphs and reconstruction”. We are probably not dealing with one, syncretic morpheme but rather two homophonous ones in the cases of 1) prefix conjugation 2m.sg./3f.sg. *t-; (2) f.sg. abstract noun/m.pl. adjective suffix *-ūt-; (3) f.sg. noun or adjective/weak root verbal noun or infinitive suffix *-t-. In the latter, most controversial case, Pat-El invoked some evidence that the verbal nouns like Biblical Hebrew šéḇeṯ ‘sitting’ (from y-š-b) are syntactically masculine (e.g. Ps 133:1).

Stefan Weninger, “The Semitic Urheimat question: a review of the proposals and some perspectives”. An overview of some proposed points of dispersal for the Semitic languages since the late 19th century, the main contenders being the Arabian peninsula and East and North Africa. In the Q&A, Kogan added his own suggestion, published in an Encyclopedia Aethiopica article: Canaan.

Walter Sommerfeld, “The concept of a common Semitic cultural area (‘Kish Civilization’) in the 3rd millennium”. Contemporary evidence shows that there is no basis for Ignace Gelb’s concept of a distinctly Semitic culture in Early Dynastic northern Babylonia.

Apart from these talks, we spent about half the time in unstructured panel discussions, on phonology, morphology, methodology, and classification/Urheimat questions. Each discussion was kicked off by a short, stimulating talk, mostly by attendees who did not present full papers: Martin Kümmel, Michaël Cysouw, and Aaron Rubin. This was an experimental feature of the workshop, and I’m on the fence about it; the discussions were certainly fun and a lot of interesting points were brought up (e.g. Kogan: linguistic paleontology shows that Proto-Semitic speakers did know hyraxes but did not know oryxes, and only Canaan is [+hyrax][-oryx]), but it felt like they yielded fewer concrete insights than regular talks would have. It was a nice way to get some more people involved, though, also from adjacent fields (Indo-European/Indo-Iranian and Caucasian/Germanic linguistics).

All in all, it was wonderful to be able to fully geek out about Proto-Semitic and its daughters for a couple of days. There’s plans to publish proceedings, so hopefully in a few years you’ll be able to read all about these topics in full detail. Stay tuned.

#Akkadian #Arabic #Berber #conference #EastCushitic #Eblaite #Egyptian #Gurage #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #news #ProtoSemitic

Leiden Summer School 2025

The program for this year’s Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics is up. Besides the Caucasian, Chinese, Language Description, Language Documentation, Indo-European (I/II), Celtic, Indology, Iranian, Linguistics (I/II), Mediterranean World, and Russian tracks, here’s the line-up for Semitic this year:

• An introduction to Arabic paleography and epigraphy (Ahmad Al-Jallad)
• Comparative Semitics (Marijn van Putten with guest lectures by me and maybe others)
• Rabbinic Hebrew (Martin Baasten)
• Classical Ethiopic (Martin Baasten)

Registration opens soon! The Summer School will run from July 21st through August 1st.

#Arabic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #news #ProtoSemitic #Rabbinic