Rhotic Phonemes in Semitic Languages – The Case of Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew

What it is about

A comparison of two Proto-Semitic sounds counted as rhotics, the trill /r/ and the fricative /ġ/, in conservative Classical Arabic and innovative Biblical Hebrew. /r/ survives in both; in Hebrew it later patterned with the gutturals (no doubling), while Greek and Latin transcriptions show it could still be doubled in the biblical period. /ġ/ is kept in Arabic (probably uvular) but in Hebrew merged with /ʿ/ (ע) by about the 3rd century BCE; the Septuagint shows the old split (Γάζα for עַזָּה with gamma, but Βαλααμ for בִּלְעָם with a vowel). Matching 259 Hebrew ע-roots with Arabic cognates, the author identifies 216, of which 30 are homonyms; restoring them gives 246 roots, about 24% with original /ġ/. Words from /ġ/-roots are rare (98 lexemes, a third hapax) and gather in a few, mostly post-exilic, books.

Ideas

• I1. For the Torah dictionary: tag ע-roots with their Proto-Semitic value (/ʿ/ or /ġ/) where a cognate is clear, and split homonymous entries that the merger created (the paper's example is עֲוִילִים "unjust ones" vs "young boys").
• I2. Use Septuagint transcriptions of names (gamma for ע) as a cheap test for /ġ/ in Torah names: עַזָּה, עֲמֹרָה (Γόμορρα), and check them against the list.
• I3. A phonology note: ר behaves as a guttural in Tiberian vocalisation (compensatory lengthening, no dagesh) but not in older transcriptions; give counts of ר + dagesh in the Torah (a handful of exceptions).

For Mova

I1 is a column and a split rule for macula dict (The lexicon, homonyms). I2 and I3 go into Phonology of Biblical Hebrew (gutturals and resh, historical sound changes). I3 is a quick count on the trees' forms; the yetzirah crate's letter tables may cite ע's double history as a note.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17951/lsmll.2018.42.1.33

@article{pietrzak2018rhotic,
  title = {{Rhotic Phonemes in Semitic Languages – The Case of Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew}},
  author = {Pietrzak, Bartosz},
  journal = {Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.17951/lsmll.2018.42.1.33},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17951/lsmll.2018.42.1.33}
}

References

17 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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