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

CALL and DOT

Two conferences in the last three weeks: my first Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics (as a speaker), in Leiden as always, and a day and a half of the 35st Deutscher Orientalistentag, in Erlangen.

Both were a lot of fun. I saw many different talks at CALL, too many to summarize, and mostly too off-topic as well. I was there to ask why we think Cushitic forms a single family within Afroasiatic (see also these blog posts). Despite the purposefully provocative title of my talk, I was not assaulted by any angry mobs of Cushiticists.1 The main question seems to be whether we really should disregard the lexicon when looking at subclassification (and then the next question should be whether the lexicon does show that Cushitic is a clade). It was also really cool to see several talks by young researchers whom I taught as first-years and who have now all finished their MAs and partially started PhD projects: shout-outs to Nina van der Vlugt, Melle Groen, and Jeroen van Ravenhorst. Post your slides online, guys!

At the DOT, I co-chaired a panel on Semitic (in practice: mostly Hebrew) reading traditions together with Harald Samuel. While some of our presenters sadly had to cancel, we still had a great line-up, with exciting findings in every talk:

Chanan Ariel (Tel-Aviv University) proposed a highly original new explanation for the Biblical Hebrew phenomenon of dehiq, where consonants following certain unstressed vowels are geminated. According to Ariel, this is an orthoepic feature and applies to vocalic suffixes that alternate with zero, as well as some cases where the geminated consonant had to be kept apart from a following guttural. Works really well IMHO.

Aaron Hornkohl (University of Cambridge) provided a thorough discussion of the ketiv-qere phenomenon, presenting an up-to-date linguistic view of its origins and purpose in hopes of spreading more awareness of this to less linguistically inclined Hebrew Bible scholars. One thing that stood out to me is that words that are present in the consonantal text but left unpronounced in the reading tradition (ketiv wela qere) are sometimes translated in targums and other ancient versions.

Jonathan Howard (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) presented his ongoing PhD research on the “Palestinian” vocalization system of Hebrew and Aramaic and pointed out that so far, there’s really no good evidence that it’s from Palestine. He’s hoping to find some, but it might be more impactful if he doesn’t.

Johan Lundberg (University of Oxford) walked us through the increasing complexity in Syriac punctuation signs, including the development of something that is roughly equivalent to an exclamation mark! Cool fact: in at least one of the few Syriac manuscripts of the entire Bible, the scribe has simply maintained the punctuation of each source text, resulting in several different systems coexisting in the same final work.

Emmanuel Mastey (Tel-Aviv University) presented a nice statistical inquiry into h-final spellings of 2m.sg. perfect verbs in Biblical Hebrew. Besides the very frequent case of נָתַתָּה ‘you gave’, Mastey finds that this spelling is especially common with verbs that have t as their third radical and, less so, with third-weak verbs. He suggests a phonological explanation for both classes; I wonder whether with the III-t roots, it may rather be motivated by the usefulness of distinguishing e.g. שתה ‘you placed’ from שת ‘he placed’.

Isabella Maurizio (University of Lorraine according to the programme, but I think that may be outdated? Sorbonne soon from what she told me) presented her recently completed research on the Second Column of Origen’s Hexapla, the oldest fully vocalized source (in Greek script!) for Biblical Hebrew. Big shock to me: Maurizio dates the Secunda to the 2nd c. BCE-1st c. CE, not the 3rd c. CE!

Marijn van Putten (Leiden University) appeared virtually to frighten the Hebraists with the tricky history of the Qur’anic reading traditions, with examples like one where a certain reader’s Arabic is notably more archaic than that of his teacher’s teacher. Since we barely know anything about who transmitted the Hebrew reading traditions, how much of this stuff are we missing due to a lack of data?

Harald Samuel (University of Tübingen) continued the sceptical line by noting some features of Tiberian Hebrew that appear to be really late (quoting me[!] from an informal conversation in which I said that a certain change must have taken place “about two hours before Ben-Asher went to work that morning”). How do we reconcile this with the alleged presence of extremely early, First Temple period features in the reading tradition as well?

Christian Stadel (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) presented on some clearly late and some unquestionably early features of the Samaritan reading tradition and talked about how it relates to the consonantal text of the Samaritan Pentateuch more generally. It reminded me a bit of a presentation I gave on a similar topic several years ago. I only have one semester of Samaritan Hebrew, though—taught by Christian Stadel!—while Stadel is a real expert on the Samaritan languages. So it was reassuring to hear him argue for similar conclusions as well as present a whole lot more interesting data.

Last of all (due to alphabetization, but it worked out alright), I got to present on the project on the construction of the Biblical Aramaic reading tradition that I’ve been doing at Leuven since 2019. I’m not sure the argument I presented is fully sound, so it was great to be able to discuss it with some colleagues afterwards.

The Semitics section continued this morning. In her section keynote, Na’ama Pat-El (University of Texas Austin) presented her SemitiLEX project (recorded talk by another project member, haven’t watched it yet), looking at cognate Semitic lexemes not just in terms of roots, but also looking at morpho-lexical features like gender and pluralization. Unexpected result: building phylogenetic trees based on these data shows Akkadian, Ugaritic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic clustering as four or five separate branches, instead of Northwest Semitic clustering together and then being closer to Arabic than to Akkadian.

Maria Rauscher (Université Félix Houphouet-Boigny) presented her ongoing work on a dictionary of Arabic verbal nouns, focusing on the difficult case of k-r-h ‘to dislike’. As we had some extra discussion time for both Pat-El’s and Rauscher’s talks, there was time enough for the audience to draw up battle lines and get into the details of linguistic theory (such as: are morphemes even a thing?).

Stefanie Rudolf (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) presented on two Qur’anic phrases that she suggests are unrecognized borrowings from Ethiosemitic. “The Lord of the East and the West” is attested in an Ethiopian Early Sabaic inscription, while Rudolf proposes the Arabic root f-t-w ‘to judge’ may be borrowed from Ethiosemitic f-t-ḥ. While she acknowledges the phonological difficulty of the last case, maybe we should reckon with the possibility of an unknown (South?) Ethiosemitic language that lost the pharyngeals acting as an intermediary: in the beginning of her talk, she pointed out that early Islamic sources refer to an Abyssinian with a name that is not Ge’ez but pre-Amharic (I think Ababut?), which I found very cool.

Jan Retsö (University of Gothenburg) pulled off the trick of reading out a text with no slides or handout while being perfectly easy to follow and entertaining. After an overview of the scholarship on Semitic–Ancient Egyptian cognates and loanwords, Retsö responded to Alexander Borg’s recent claim that there are lots of specifically Arabic loanwords in Egyptian. Retsö thinks there’s something there but urges for methodological precision.

Mohammad I. Ababneh (University of Halle) presented on some difficulties in Safaitic paleography, including merged letters and ligatures and other weird letter shapes. Nice to see some discussion of former Leiden colleague Chiara Della Puppa’s dissertation!

Finally, Vera Tsukanova (Philipps-Universität Marburg) took a look at the phonological adaptation of Persian loanwords into Arabic from a Semiticist and diachronic perspective. Historical differences in aspiration go a long way in accounting for prima facie unexpected sounds in borrowings.

And now, the conference is kind of on hold for various business meetings, which I took as my cue to leave. In conclusion, I would like to note that I am posting this from a high-speed train, which feels very futuristic. While some discussions in the field stay the same for what seems like forever—Paul Kahle’s lecture at the first DOT in 1922 1921 was referenced multiple times—I take this as a sign that like Deutsche Bahn passengers, no matter the inevitable delays, detours, and frustrations, overall, we are getting somewhere.

#Akkadian #Amharic #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Bible #Cushitic #EastCushitic #Egyptian #Hebrew #linguistics #Samaritans #Syriac #Ugaritic

‘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

Hebrew and Aramaic differ in the shape of their resultative or passive participles, things like Hebrew בָּרוּךְ bārūḵ, Aramaic בְּרִיךְ bərīḵ, both ‘blessed’. If you ask for a son in Hebrew, you’ll get Saul (שָׁאוּל šāʔūl ‘asked for’), while in Aramaic, you’ll end up with Silas (שְׁאִילָא šəʔīl-ā ‘the one asked for’). The vowel in the first syllable of both patterns comes from a short *a, which was lengthened in Hebrew and reduced in Aramaic, but the second vowel shows that we’re dealing with two different patterns: *CaCūC– for Hebrew and *CaCīC– for Aramaic. Ugaritic shows reflexes of both of these patterns as well (although *CaCīC– seems more frequent), so I’ve assumed that both occurred in Proto-Northwest-Semitic and Hebrew and Aramaic each picked one to generalize. But now it strikes me that in Hebrew, fossilized participles of this type that have turned into common nouns are practically always *CaCīC-. Consider cases like:

• מָשִׁיחַ māšīaḥ ‘anointed one’, from מָשַׁח māšaḥ ‘to anoint’
• נָשִׁיא nāśī ‘chieftain’ < *’elevated one’, from נָשָׂא nāśā ‘to lift up’
• נָגִיד nāḡīḏ ‘ruler’ < *’notable one’, from נָגַד* *nāḡaḏ ‘to notice’? only attested in the causative הִגִּיד higgīḏ ‘to tell’ < *’to make (someone) notice’?
• נָבִיא nāḇī ‘prophet’ < *’called one’ (as in, called by a deity), from an obsolete verb נָבָא* *nāḇā ‘to call’
• פָּלִיט pālīṭ ‘fugitive’ < *’escaped one’, from פָּלַט pālaṭ ‘to escape’

The difference between these lexicalized forms and the productive adjective is nice and clear when you compare ‘imprisoned’, אָסוּר ʔāsūr, and ‘prisoner’, almost always אָסִיר ʔāsīr.

Although I’m not sure where that leaves us with Ugaritic, I think this shows that Hebrew also used to have *CaCīC– as the resultative participle pattern (apparently also found in Phoenician) and *CaCūC– is a pretty late pre-Hebrew innovation.

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/08/07/resultative-participles-in-hebrew-and-aramaic/

#Aramaic #Bible #Hebrew #linguistics #Phoenician #Ugaritic

Now I'm confused again, is the scholarly consensus that #Ugaritic isn't #Canaanite these days?

#NorthwestSemitic #DeadLanguages #Ugarit
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaanite_languages

Earlier this year, I had two fun conversations with the team of the then newly-founded Kedem YouTube channel, which popularizes scholarship on the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible. The first video was published yesterday. We talk about the concept of a language family, what languages constitute the Semitic language family, where Semitic comes from geographically and linguistically, how we can reconstruct earlier ancestors of the attested languages, and a few things this kind of reconstruction tells us about Proto-Semitic.

Stay posted for my second video with this channel, to be released sometime next year, on the different modern and—especially—ancient pronunciations of Biblical Hebrew.

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/video-intro-to-the-semitic-language-family/

#Afroasiatic #Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Berber #Chadic #Cushitic #Egyptian #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #Moabite #ModernSouthArabian #news #Omotic #Phoenician #ProtoSemitic #Tigrinya #Ugaritic

While reviewing proofs for an article that should appear soon, it struck me that the shape ordinal numerals like ‘third’, ‘fourth’, ‘fifth’ take in Semitic provides some evidence for subgrouping that I don’t think I’ve seen before. Quick recap: most scholars today accept something like the following family tree for Semitic, as compellingly presented by Huehnergard & Rubin (2011).

I’m generally skeptical about West Semitic as a group because I think everyone’s favourite West Semitic innovation, the *qatala perfect, may be a retention from Proto-Semitic. But among some other innovations (I particularly like relative/demonstrative *θū > *ðū), this subgroup is supported by the shape of the ordinals. Akkadian has a *CaCuC– pattern, as in:

• Old Babylonian šaluš– ‘third’, rebu– < *rabuʕ– ‘fourth’, ḫamuš– ‘fifth’
• Old Assyrian rabū-t-um ‘the fourth (f.)’, rabū-ni ‘our fourth witness’, ḫamuš-ni ‘our fifth witness’

In West Semitic, the normal ordinal has a different, *CāCiC- pattern, as in:

• Classical Arabic θāliθ-, rābiʕ-, ḫāmis-
• Ge’ez śaləs, rabəʕ, ḫaməs
• Mehri (Modern South Arabian) śōləθ, rōbaʕ, ḫōməs
• probably also Sabaic θlθ, rbʕ, ḫms; Ugaritic θlθ, rbʕ, ḫmš…

In the rest of Northwest Semitic, one trace of this pattern might be found if the consonantal spelling tltʔ in Daniel 5:16 (Biblical Aramaic) stands for *tālítā ‘as the third one’ (Suchard 2022: 224). Otherwise, Aramaic and Canaanite have a different pattern: *CaCīC– followed by the nisbe suffix, which has a special shape in Aramaic. Examples:

• Biblical Hebrew šlīšī, rḇīʕī, ḥămiššī (probably influenced by šiššī ‘sixth’, itself a new formation for expected **šḏīšī)
• Syriac tliṯoy, rbiʕoy, ḥmišoy

So, we have three patterns: *CaCuC-, *CāCiC-, and *CaCīC–īy/āy-. Which one is oldest and which ones are innovative?

Interestingly, Ge’ez and Modern South Arabian both have a special set of numerals that specifically refer to periods of time like days:

• Ge’ez śälus, räbuʕ, ḫämus
• Mehri śīləθ, rība, ḫayməh

In the article I’m proofreading, I argue these can all be reconstructed as *CaCuC-. This also matches Biblical Hebrew ʕāśōr ‘tenth (day)’ and may be related to dialectal Arabic names for the days of a the week like ʔaθ-θalūθ and ʔar-rabūʕ (borrowed from Sabaic???). This matches the Akkadian pattern for the normal numerals, which also happens to be attested with reference to a period of time in Old Assyrian ḫamuš-t-um. It’s more likely for an old formation to be preserved in a specialized use like referring to numbers of days than for something specific like that to be generalized for ordinals in all contexts. *CāCiC– also has an obvious origin, as this is the productive pattern for active participles and we can imagine a kind of shift from ‘being third’ as a participle to ‘third’ as an ordinal. So in terms of innovations, this looks like:

*CaCīC–īy/āy– is so restricted that it is most attractive to see this as a late innovation shared by Canaanite and Aramaic. If so, that would support Pat-El & Wilson-Wright’s (2018; paywalled?) argument on other grounds that these two families form a subgroup within Northwest Semitic.

An intermediate *CaCīC– pattern without the nisbe suffix added might be attested in Biblical Hebrew šālīš, which not only means ‘one-third (of some unknown measure)’ but is also a military rank that has traditionally been explained as the ‘third man’ on a chariot besides the primary warrior and the driver.

This pattern also forms fractions in Aramaic, as in Imperial Aramaic rbyʕ and Syriac rbiʕ-t-o ‘quarter’. So maybe we should see the pre-Aramaeo-Canaanite development as a shift from still very active-participle-y *CāCiC– to more productively adjectival *CaCīC-, with the extra adjectival nisbe suffix being added later for good measure. Maybe that last step took place after the ordinals had started to shift in meaning to fractions (which are nouns, not adjectives), giving something like *rabīʕ–īy– an original literal meaning like ‘quarter-y’.

In conclusion, an ordinals-based family tree ends up looking like this:

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/11/03/ordinal-numerals-as-shared-innovations-in-semitic/

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

The Burning #Sun and the Killing #Resheph: Proto-Astrological Symbolism and #Ugaritic Epic [pp. 73-83 in Campion & Green, edd., Sky and Symbol, 2013]

#AncientAstrology #Astrology #Ugarit #AncientLevant #AncientNearEast #CanaaniteMyth #HistoryOfAstrology #CanaaniteReligion
https://www.academia.edu/14327702/The_Burning_Sun_and_the_Killing_Resheph_Proto_Astrological_Symbolism_and_Ugaritic_Epic_pp_73_83_in_Campion_and_Green_edd_Sky_and_Symbol_2013_