Where Does ’Ayyē Come From? Proclisis and Affix Pleonasm in the Biblical Hebrew Interrogatives ’Ē and ’Ayyē

Abstract

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.