Opuscula Ugaritico-Accadico-Hebraica: Relative particles, paʿam, and Amraphel

What it is about

Two comparative-Semitic etymology studies. The first takes up why Biblical Hebrew has two relative particles, אֲשֶׁר and the short שֶׁ־/שַׁ־ (plus rare זוּ). Building on Huehnergard, the author agrees that שֶׁ־ is an unstressed short form of אֲשֶׁר (originally a noun "place", cf. Ugaritic aṯr) and not a loan from Akkadian ša, but argues it also merged with the old accusative form of the Semitic relative pronoun *ðā; that would explain its a/e vowel wavering (שַׁ־ in Judg 5:7, both in Song 1:7) and why it lives, like זוּ, mainly in poetry and late prose, while classical prose uses אֲשֶׁר. The second study links Hebrew פַּעַם ("time" as in "three times", rarely "foot/step") with Ugaritic pamt "time" and pʿn "foot", and with the name Amraphel (Gen 14:1), explaining the irregular sound correspondences by a Levantine scribal pronunciation that confused ʿayin.

Ideas

• I1. Give the Torah dictionary an etymology line for אֲשֶׁר (from "place"; short form שֶׁ־; not from Akkadian ša) and for פַּעַם (concrete "foot/step" > "occurrence, time"), marked as a scholarly proposal with this source.
• I2. Count the relative markers in the Torah (אֲשֶׁר vs שֶׁ־ vs זוּ, and the archaic poetic זוּ in Exod 15) by register (prose vs the poems: Gen 49, Exod 15, Num 23–24, Deut 32–33) to show the poetry/prose split the paper relies on.
• I3. In the polysemy section, use פַּעַם as a model case of a body-part noun becoming a counter ("this time", "three times"); the trees can separate the two by whether a numeral or demonstrative modifies it.

For Mova

I1 and I3 belong to macula dict and The lexicon (roots, polysemy, names: Amraphel). I2 is a count for 05-pronouns-particles.md (the relative) and 12-biblical-mishnaic-modern.md (שֶׁ־ is the Mishnaic relative), using the register label of the poems.

Topics: Akkadian and cuneiform NLP

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5508/jhs29553

@article{wikander2019opuscula,
  title = {{Opuscula Ugaritico-Accadico-Hebraica: Relative particles, paʿam, and Amraphel}},
  author = {Wikander, Ola},
  journal = {Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 19},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.5508/jhs29553},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs29553}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hbo-2019-wikander-opuscula-ugaritico-accadico-hebraica-relative/