Semitic languages, Biblical Hebrew, Hebrew Bible
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In reply to <a href="https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/verners-law-and-korean/comment-page-1/#comment-457">Thomas</a>. <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Thank you! I oversimplified the Wikipedia description of the gorgia toscana.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph -->
12.3.2025 21:27Comment on Verner’s Law and Korean by David Marjanović… reposted this!
11.3.2025 12:45Comment on Leiden Summer School 2025 by AT… liked this!
11.3.2025 12:45Comment on Leiden Summer School 2025 by ATThe program for this year’s Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics is up. Besides the Caucasian, Chinese, Language Description, Language Documentation, Indo-European (I/II), Celtic, Indology, Iranian, Linguistics (I/II), Mediterranean World, and Russian tracks, here’s the line-up for Semitic this year: Registration opens soon! The Summer School will run from July 21st through August 1st.
11.3.2025 12:06Leiden Summer School 2025In reply to <a href="https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/06/13/vowels-in-jewish-pronunciations-of-hebrew-ii/comment-page-1/#comment-458">Yitzchak Dickman</a>. Thank you, this is all very interesting!
4.3.2025 14:37Comment on Vowels in Jewish pronunciations of Hebrew (II) by Benjamin SuchardI've never seen an explicit presentation of Anglo pronunciations of nikud before. It's my native pronunciation, and it's always felt weird how none of the references to Ashkenazi vowel pronunciation actually aligned with the one I grew up with. Excellent content. Three notes on the presented "Anglo" pronunciation. First, I'm curious if the small Anglo Jewish communities of non-Ashkenazi background, like the Syrian or Persian communities in the US, use the same pronunciation or not. Secondly, Anglo Hebrew might actually have an eight-vowel distinction; I was taught growing up that shva na was pronounced ɪ (like the vowel in General American English "hit"), and I still pronounce it like that. Thirdly, there's definitely a lot of cross-pollination between Israeli and Anglo, going both ways; many Modern Orthodox communities in the US have very inconsistently adopted features of Israeli pronunciation (dropping taf/saf distinction, merging kamatz and patach), while Anglo Olim to Israel frequently code-switch, using Anglo in prayer and study and Israeli in common speech. I'm in the latter category, and there is bleed-over both ways in my idiolect; I usually pronounce shva na as ɪ even in my Israeli, and my holam and tzere sometimes lose their diphthongness in my Anglo.
4.3.2025 13:21Comment on Vowels in Jewish pronunciations of Hebrew (II) by Yitzchak DickmanIn reply to <a href="https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/verners-law-and-korean/comment-page-1/#comment-454">David Marjanović</a>. <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Re: initial position being a fortis position </p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>In the gorgia toscana, this is true of sentence-initial position (or well, postpausal position), but not word-initial. A word initial stop mid sentence still gets lenited. This is also true of (pre-)iberic lenition of voiced stops, and the much stronger lenition of sardinian and corsican.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Interestingly, this is not true at all of the "west romance" lenition of stops. Imho this is the main notable characteristic of the la spezia-rimini line, perhaps the only one.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>On the opposite end, in neapolitan, word-initial is nearly always a weak position, making /v ɣ ɾ j/ the "default" realizations for underlying voiced stops, contrasting with geminated /bː gː dː d͡ʒː/</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph -->
28.2.2025 14:59Comment on Verner’s Law and Korean by ThomasIn reply to <a href="https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/verners-law-and-korean/comment-page-1/#comment-455">Benjamin Suchard</a>. <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Oh, interesting.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph -->
27.2.2025 14:08Comment on Verner’s Law and Korean by David MarjanovićIn reply to <a href="https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/verners-law-and-korean/comment-page-1/#comment-454">David Marjanović</a>. <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Thank you for all of this! Your last point reminded me of Western Neo-Aramaic, where word-initial plosives were originally subject to BGDKPT spirantization depending on sandhi with the preceding word (as in classical dialects), but then generalized the fricative. E.g., *<em>kalbā </em>'the dog' > <em>xalpa</em>, even when not preceded by a vowel.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph -->
27.2.2025 08:49Comment on Verner’s Law and Korean by Benjamin Suchard<!-- wp:paragraph --> <p><em>Funnily enough, for a language with around 80 million speakers, there’s no broad consensus on how to analyze these stops</em></p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>I'd say that's exactly why: there's lots of geographic and other variation in Korean.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>For example, I bet the tonogenesis isn't happening in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch-accent_language#Korean" rel="nofollow ugc">the dialects that haven't (entirely) lost the previous tone system</a>. Indeed, <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0240682" rel="nofollow ugc">this paper</a> on the phenomenon you describe is careful to specify "Seoul Korean" at every opportunity.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>That paper also shows that only young women have completed the development. Young men are less far along, old women less still, and old men haven't even begun it.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Furthermore, it assessed the merger of the lenes and the aspirates exclusively by measuring voice-onset time. But long VOT isn't synonymous with aspiration. I've heard very little Korean, but in the one case that's relevant here, I knew a young woman was saying <em>gapjil</em>, and I heard neither the [g̊] I expected nor the [kʰ] expected from the tonogenetic merger – I heard a cluster [kh], with a released fortis [k] followed by [h]. If that's true, it violates a proposed language universal: a phonemic contrast between [Cʰ] and tautosyllabic [Ch] clusters is not supposed to exist.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>(As it happens, [g̊h] clusters are common in southern German dialects like mine, because <em>ge-</em> has lost its vowel. But these dialects all lack aspirates other than [h] itself, so the universal is safe from that side.)</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>...Warning about that paper: PLOS doesn't make page proofs. There is nevertheless a copyediting process which introduces mistakes; these get published, no matter how nonsensical, and there's nothing the authors can do about it. In this case, the copyeditors or the Artificial Stupidity they were using didn't understand the concept of beginning a sentence with a reference (". [48] explained that"...) and moved all these references to the end of the preceding sentence with no regard for grammaticality whatsoever: "[48]. Explained that" – again and again and again.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p><em>[...] Vedic Sanskrit. In the traditional recitation, the Vedic accent is not itself associated with high pitch, the way a transcription like </em>agnínā<em> ‘Agni (instr.)’ might suggest.</em></p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The commentaries are clear that the Vedic accent was very much associated with high pitch in speaking. (I think they even say how high.) Recitation is different: it takes this rise in pitch and stretches it across three syllables, exaggerating it to the point that immediately pretonic unstressed syllables get low pitch, and that high pitch is only reached on the immediately posttonic unstressed syllable – indeed, if possible, only on its second mora. (This is beautifully audible in the video you link to. BTW, the language of the translation is Belorussian for, presumably, some reason.)</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The extremely formal treatment of stress in Vedic recitation does show something else interesting: unaccented words, i.e. words that have lost their stress for syntactic reasons (in particular finite verbs in second position), lack the rise in pitch, but they still have a louder first syllable. This fits expectations: when stress is lost (in individual words or across the whole language) in early IE, it defaults to the first syllable.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p><em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verner%27s_law" rel="nofollow ugc">Verner’s Law</a> is a sound change that affected pre-Proto-Germanic. The conditioning is pretty bizarre and I always have to look it up or think really hard about the couple of examples I know from memory.</em></p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>I used to think Verner's Law was reverse tonogenesis, and as a consequence I found the conditioning exactly backwards. Now I think it's much simpler and had nothing to do with pitches. </p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Instead, I now think Verner's Law happened before (most of) Grimm’s and simply turned all voiceless consonants into their voiced counterparts except in “positions of strength”: word-initially* and right after stressed vowels. Later, Grimm’s struck and turned all the remaining aspirates into fricatives.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>(The details of what I think, and the entire convoluted story of how I got there, are all in the thread beginning <a href="https://thehousecarpenter.wordpress.com/2016/09/19/the-insecurity-of-relative-chronologies/#comment-208" rel="nofollow ugc">here</a> – together with numerous other issues.)</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The beginning of words is a “strong position” in numerous undisputed sound changes, e.g. bgadkpat or the High German consonant shift; this is related to, or even part of, a more widespread phenomenon of word-initial plosives being treated like long ones when long ones exist, as seen in Italian generally and the <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuscan_gorgia" rel="nofollow ugc">gorgia toscana</a></em> in particular. The position right after the stress is the only one where southeastern German, which is stress-timed, allows consonant length (e.g., <em>Satellit</em> is spelled as if stressed on the middle syllable, but instead it has final stress and is therefore pronounced as if spelled <em>satelitt</em>).</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>It is important that consonant clusters were largely exempt from Verner’s law. Clusters are another “position of strength”, but shouldn’t prevent (forward or) reverse tonogenesis.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>* Actually, there are a few words that suddenly make sense if Verner’s law happened word-initially. (Starting <a href="https://www.academia.edu/79260785/The_origin_of_Finn_kansa_Germanic_or_just_Indo_European-" rel="nofollow ugc">here</a> on slide 34; note that slide 41 calls a regional Central German phenomenon “High German”, but that’s irrelevant here.) But they’re still outnumbered by words where this clearly did not happen. Maybe word boundaries originally played no role and Verner’s law was only blocked if the preceding word happened to end in a stressed syllable, giving lots of words a version with a voiced and a version with a voiceless initial, and then the less common form of each was eliminated… that wouldn’t be any stranger than the elimination of <em>[English as she is] spoke</em>.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph -->
26.2.2025 19:34Comment on Verner’s Law and Korean by David Marjanović… reposted this!
24.2.2025 17:56Comment on Verner’s Law and Korean by ATWatching Squid Game 2 (which is excellent so far) got me looking up some things about Korean phonetics again this morning. Like Semitic and Proto-Indo-European, for instance, Korean has three sets of plosives. The phonetics are quite different from those other languages, though. Funnily enough, for a language with around 80 million speakers, there’s no […]
24.2.2025 10:52Verner’s Law and KoreanThe usual disclaimer: I did not thoroughly research this and did not identify which 19th-century German already made this point in print long ago. This semester, I’m teaching a class on creation and flood myths in the Hebrew Bible and Akkadian literature. It’s a lot of fun, exposing me to some awesome texts I’ve never […]
18.2.2025 18:27Secondary luminaries in Genesis 1?The creation story in Genesis 1 has a few sentences like this: God made the different kinds of wild animals and the different kinds of domesticated animals and all the different kinds of animals that crawl the earth. (Genesis 1:25a) The word that I’m translating here as “different kinds of” is -מִינ mīn-. It follows […]
12.2.2025 13:27Two kinds of mīn- in Genesis 1I’ve been working on an overview of the morphological arguments for which language families do and do not belong to Afroasiatic. One of the features you find in nearly every branch of Afroasiatic is a system of derivational affixes where *s forms causatives, *m (*n in Semitic and Egyptian) forms some kind of middle, and […]
30.1.2025 09:45East Cushitic and Omotic passive *-ad’-There’s a near-consensus among today’s Hebrew Bible scholar that the weirdly militaristic fourteenth chapter of Genesis is a late addition to the book, maybe the latest passage in the whole Pentateuch. This summer, I gave a talk where I considered the most important arguments supporting this view, especially the linguistic ones, and concluded they don’t […]
12.12.2024 10:08A literary argument against Genesis 14’s latenessThe Semitic languages show a regular correspondence of p in some languages and f in others. For instance, ‘mouth’ in Akkadian is p-ū; Biblical Hebrew pe; Biblical Aramaic pūm; Ge’ez ʾäf; and Classical Arabic fam-. (Modern South Arabian should have an f too, but has replaced this word.) This sound is uncontroversially reconstructed as Proto-Semitic […]
7.11.2024 16:06Froto-SemiticThe government of the Netherlands is planning to dramatically cut funding for universities (background article here). At institutions like Leiden University’s Faculty of Humanities, where I graduated and am currently a guest researcher, this comes on top of an already disastrous situation. If you’ve valued some of the research coming out of Dutch universities over […]
25.10.2024 21:23Petition: stop €1 billion in budget cuts in Dutch academiaTrying to learn more about Ethiopia(n Semitic languages), I just finished reading William A. Shack’s The Central Ethiopians. Amhara, Tigriňa and related peoples (1974; London: International African Institute). It’s 50 years old, many of the sources it uses are over 100 years old, and I’m sure it’s full of inaccuracies I didn’t recognize besides the […]
20.10.2024 19:26Gurage evidence for Proto-Semitic religionYom Kippur starts tomorrow night, heralded in by one of the best-known Aramaic texts in the Jewish liturgy. For the sake of Aramaic awareness, here’s a glossed transcription of the text that will hopefully reveal some of its grammatical structure. It’s always fun to tease apart the Aramaic and Hebrew in cases like this. Text […]
10.10.2024 08:06Kol Nidrei