Benjamin Kantor investigates the attestations of the way-yiqṭol form in ancient Greek and Latin transcriptions of Biblical Hebrew and compares those attestations with medieval Jewish traditions of Biblical Hebrew (Tiberian, Babylonian) and with the Samaritan tradition. It is shown that the Greek and Latin transcriptions help us understand the development of the later Jewish and Samaritan traditions. By the time of Jerome’s transcriptions (fourth/fifth century CE), the gemination following the initial wa- is generalised, whereas earlier, in Origen’s Secunda (circa first–third centuries CE), it is not fully developed. In the Samaritan tradition there is no trace of this kind of gemination. The article reaches the important conclusion that gemination in way-yiqṭol is a development of the Second Temple Jewish traditions, but not the Samaritan tradition.
The growing trend to see the language of the LXX as an authentic example of post-Classical Greek may be extended to phonology and orthography. We can situate the phonology of the LXX within its historical Greek phonological context by implementing a restrictive methodology that focuses on transcribed names, the clusters of certain spelling conventions in relation to “early” and “late” books in the LXX, and manuscript-specific phenomena. We find that its language exhibits the same sort of phonological and orthographic features attested in contemporary documentary and epigraphic material. Codex Vaticanus provides the earliest explicit evidence for one of the notable phonological developments in the history of Greek, the fricativization of χ. It is demonstrated that the phonology of the LXX is right at home in its contemporary historical Greek phonological setting, and that it has unique contributions to make to the wider field of historical Greek phonology at large.
Significant linguistic research has been carried out in the field of language register and its relevance for speech patterns. In various contexts, language users tend to employ different linguistic features, especially but not limited to the realm of pronunciation. In many linguistic communities, there is a higher register of language associated with more formal settings, a lower register of language associated with less formal settings, and a wide spectrum of variation in between. In the context of reading traditions that develop around a sacred text, the same principles may apply. While the pronunciation (or phonology) of the reading tradition often interacts with and is influenced by the vernacular, tradents of the reading tradition often try to preserve a more “archaic,” conservative, and/or simply distinct pronunciation. There appears to be evidence that such a phenomenon was already at play in Biblical Hebrew reading traditions of late antiquity. By comparing Greek and Latin transcriptions of the Biblical Hebrew reading traditions of late antiquity to transcriptions of Hebrew taken from non-biblical sources, we can actually isolate multiple features that demonstrate a distinct difference in pronunciation between biblical and non-biblical sources. The collection of linguistic features characteristic of the reading tradition may properly be termed a “performance register,” the societal implications of which for Jewish communities of late antiquity will be explored in closing.
Interrogatives from the base *’ayy- are common throughout Semitic. Two of the reflexes of this base in Biblical Hebrew, ’ē ‘where?’ and ’ayyē ‘where?’, exhibit atypical phonological features. In the case of ’ē (< *’ayy-v), the diphthong *ay ought to have been preserved due to the following gemination (cf. day [< *dayy-v] ‘sufficiency’). In the case of ’ayyē, the final ṣere is unusual. In this paper, I argue that contraction has occurred in ’ē because it is proclitic and that the ṣere (-ē) ending in ’ayyē is from the Semitic adverbial ending *-ay, which also contracted to -ē due to proclisis. The morphosyntactic developments of these forms, taken within their wider Semitic context, shed light on the linguistic phenomenon of ‘affix pleonasm‘ in both Hebrew and Semitic.
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