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The Biblical Hebrew wayyiqtol and the Evidence of the Amarna Letters from Canaan

What it is about

A historical argument for where wayyiqtol comes from. The short prefix conjugation with past (preterite) meaning is common Semitic (Akkadian iprus, West Semitic yaqtul); the question is whether the 14th-century BCE Amarna letters from Canaan attest it as a Canaanite form, since their language is a scribal Akkadian–Canaanite mix and morphology alone cannot decide. The author points to six letter passages, each by a different scribe, where yaqtul forms joined by u "and" form a chain of past events, a narrative-like syntax close to the Hebrew wayyiqtol chain. He reconstructs: preterite yaqtul (marked by a zero ending, against imperfective yaqtulu) chained by wa; when final short vowels fell, wa itself became the past marker and fused with the verb, keeping its old vowel a (hence וַ not וְ), with the doubling of the prefix consonant (after Loprieno 1980) as the device that closes the syllable to keep that a. "Free" past yiqtol without waw in archaic poetry is the older use left over.

Ideas

For Mova

I1 and I2 belong in The verb (wayyiqtol) and 07-weak-verbs.md (apocopation), I1 also in 03-phonology.md (dagesh forte, compensatory lengthening) and as a consistency check in tools/macula. I3 is a note for 06-verb.md and the poetry sections, and a gloss exception for the Torah dictionary's examples.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5508/jhs.2016.v16.a3

@article{baranowski2016biblical,
  title = {{The Biblical Hebrew wayyiqtol and the Evidence of the Amarna Letters from Canaan}},
  author = {Baranowski, Krzysztof J.},
  journal = {Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 16},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.5508/jhs.2016.v16.a3},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs.2016.v16.a3}
}

References

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