Yesterday I got to finish this semester's #Biblical #Hebrew teaching with a class on pausal forms. Heard from some colleagues that they found them a bit intimidating but the students got the hang of them. So I thought I'd share the three main rules I taught them 👇 1/11 First: what are pausal forms? Like in some other languages, many BH words have a separate form when a pause follows (or would in natural speech). For the first two rules, this can be the end of a sentence or a sentence-internal pause, like a comma in English. 2/11

@PhDniX @lloydgonkillya Was reading about this today! I'm now convinced of the older opinion that Arabic /s/ was too far back to be represented with samekh. So shin was used instead. So kind of the same question as why Latin doesn't have theta, phi, or chi: no matching sound. @PhDniX @lloydgonkillya Sometime in the early Islamic period there seems to have been a chain shift with ش /ç/ becoming /ʃ/ and س becoming more hissing. McDonald [sic] (1974) tries to date this based on the difference between Western & Eastern abjad...

Some thoughts on the Proto-#Semitic word for 'woman, wife' on this #InternationalWomensDay.

The broad outlines of the reconstruction are clear, since many different languages have pretty similar forms. The stem must be something like *ʔV(n)θ-(a)t-. 1/11 This *-(a)t- is the feminine suffix. From the same consonantal root, we also find some other words: #Arabic ʔunθā 'feminine', #Amorite(!) /taʔnīθ-um/, predictably bizarre Modern South Arabian forms like #Jibbali teθ, etc. (for Ancient South Arabian, see below). 2/11

How did Jesus pronounce his own name? Hint: it wasn’t Jesus. Or even Yeshua. Or anything at all like Yahashawa or the many variants diligently documented by @arabic_bad. 1/14 The pronunciations like Yahawashi etc. come from the idea that in the #Hebrew alphabet (especially the Paleo-Hebrew one), every letter represents a syllable. You can then read the original form of the name, יהושע (Paleo 𐤉𐤄𐤅𐤔𐤏) ‘Joshua’, as Ya-ha-wa-sha-i. Or something. 2/14

More of an article outline than a thread, but tweeting about an idea is more fun than looking up which 19th-century German already published it. So: a thread about the h in ʔĕlōhīm/allåhå/ʔilāh- etc. ‘god’, and why the #Hebrew word is morphologically plural. 1/20 Proto-#Semitic for ‘god’ can be reconstructed as *ʔil-, without *h. This is clear from #Akkadian il-, #Ugaritic i͗l, Hebrew ʔēl, maybe some others. Those last two are used both as common nouns and as names, uppercase-G ‘God’, ‘El’. 2/20

The #Deltacron tweet made a big impression on me yesterday and I've been thinking about letter names ever since. One thing to note is that we like to pretend we know what the #Phoenician letter names were, but we don't really. Most of the names you see are actually #Hebrew. 1/10 That goes for names like "aleph". Sometimes you'll see reconstructed forms, like "ʾalp", which are closer to the #Greek names and partially also attested in the Septuagint of Psalm 119 (118 in Gk)—but there they're actually Hebrew too, of course. 2/10 en.katabiblon.com/us/index.php?t…

Crazy #Syriac word of the day, from our class reading yesterday: ܚܙܐܘܝܗܝ ḥzauy 'they saw him' (transcriptions again reflect West Syriac pronunciation). More letters in Syriac than in transcription! I wrote about the redundant suffix two weeks ago: 1/10

https://twitter.com/bnuyaminim/status/1455915480208838665?s=20

The III-weak plural ending ܘ- -aw as in ܚܙܘ ḥzaw 'they saw' turns into -au- before suffixes, written -ܐܘ- -ʔw- with an extra alaph to spell the hiatus (two vowels in a row). At least, this is the traditional explanation; forms like *ḥzaw-y turning to ḥzauy. 2/10

This is starting now! Will be doing some livetweeting.

https://twitter.com/d_stoekl/status/1402892647744815109

After a summary of his original argument, @IdanDershowitz moves on to discussing some major points of criticism.

A few words on how the #Qumran sect referred to the #Pharisees, whom they did *not* like.

Their writings often refer to the דורשי חלקות *dōrešē ḥalāqōt 'seekers/interpreters of smooth things'. This appears to be the Dead Sea Scrolls' most common term for the Pharisees. 1/5 It is probably a pun on דורשי הלכות *dōrešē halākōt 'interpreters of halakhot (= Pharisaic/Rabbinic rules)'. With the weakened pronunciation of the gutturals /ḥ/ and /h/ known from these texts, it was probably even more hilarious. It implies the Pharisees wanted easy rules. 2/5

Short? thread on III-y verbs in #Aramaic:

Based on #Hebrew and #Arabic, we reconstruct a slightly irregular paradigm for the prefix conjugation for Pr-Cntrl-#Semitic, where the 3rd radical is lost word-finally:

imperfect *ta-bniy-u 'you build'; but
imperative *bni 'build!' 1/7 In Arabic, the *-iyu of the imperfect contracts to -ī, while the imperative adds i- before the cluster:

imperfect *ta-bniy-u > tabnī
imperative *bni > ibni

Cf. @PhDniX's article on triphthong contraction in Arabic: 2/7 academia.edu/32715681/The_d…

The #Hebrew and #Aramaic vocalization sign shwa is sometimes read as a reduced vowel (hence the phonetic term schwa). Other times, it indicates the absence of any vowel. The rules are pretty clear, but there's some disagreement over words ending in 2 consonants with shwa. 1/6 For example, should Biblical Aramaic אַנְתְּה 'you (m.sg.)' be read as Ɂant or Ɂantə? (Yes, there's an extra ה at the end and yes, the Masoretes read shwa as a full vowel, not [ə]; that's all not relevant right now, you know what I mean.) 2/6

Time for some #Semitic geekery concerning 'hollow verbs'. These are verbs which have a vowel (usually long) where strong verbs have their second radical consonant, like #Arabic qām-a 'he stood up', ya-qūm-u 'he will stand up', #Hebrew qām, yā-qūm (same meanings). 1/9 It's controversial whether these hollow verbs already had this shape in Proto-Semitic. The alternative is that they originally had the consonant *w or *y as their second radical, but that this dropped out in various languages, causing vowel contraction. 2/9

I thought it would be fun to share my own #MICAH13 presentation with you all via Twitter – @PhDniX's excellent Twitter recaps of his talks were a major factor behind me getting on here too. This was a 20-minute talk, so: LONG thread. This talk is about #Biblical #Aramaic, attested in the books of #Ezra and #Daniel. Scholars have long debated the linguistic background of these texts, nearly always focusing on the consonantal text. But in the case of Biblical Aramaic, that only tells you half the story.