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September 20, 2007

Genotype Does Not Imply "Phonotype."

Reporting on the J-2 haplogroup in Mediterranean populations, Jim Davila at PaleoJudaica said the following:

This implies, not surprisingly, that Israelites and Canaanites shared not only the same language (Hebrew and Phoenician are really nothing more than dialectal variants) but also key genetic material.

Hold on a minute! I don't find it too surprising that, as the article Jim quotes says,

The J2 lineage originated in the northern portion of the Fertile Crescent where it later spread throughout central Asia, the Mediterranean, and south into India. . . . The J2 haplogroup is far more ancient than the Jewish religion and is found in many lines with Mediterranean region ancient ancestry. Another relatively more recent mode for J2's entry into some parts of Europe from the Mediterranean areas could have been the Roman Legions and Roman settlements.

Over the long haul of history, the Mediterranean and northern Fertile Crescent people got around. There was a lot of "gene swapping."

But, Jim's concluding remarks go a little too far. I've written on this before and Anson Rainey's recent article on the origins of the Israelites and their language provides some additional food for thought. Now, I'm not quite ready to buy into all that Rainey has for sale but I do think he is quite correct that Hebrew is more closely related to Aramaic than it is to Phoenician. Genotype does not necessarily code for (or even imply) "phonotype."

I take the following from Rainey's article, 52-56, and add my own comments,

1) While the speakers of Hebrew and Aramaic (and Moabite, Ammonite and Edomite at least) borrowed their alphabet from the Canaanite/Phoenician 22 letter alphabet, that alphabet was not well suited to these languages. Hebrew had at least 25 consonants, maintaining most of the proto-Semitic repertory. Hebrew distinguished between the ḥ and the ḫ until the late third century BCE (possibly longer). Hebrew also distinguished between the ʿ and the ǵ. The dual use of the ש accounts for the 25th consonant. Rainey says that Aramaic had 26 consonants. I don't know enough about Aramaic phonology to comment. I will note that while there is some very limited evidence from the Amarna letters that Canaanite distinguished between ḥ and the ḫ, there is no such evidence for ʿ and the ǵ. In addition, at least one of the texts in the short, 22 consonant, cuneiform alphabet (KTU 6.70) is certainly some form of early Phoenician, as opposed to Ugaritic or Hebrew. At least two fuller cuneiform alphabets, the canonical Ugaritic alphabet and a cuneiform version of the something like the old South Semitic alphabet were available to the scribe of this inscription. Sure, the scribe of this inscription on a jar handle from Sarepta in Lebanon may not have know of the other two options but the scribe of KTU 1.77, also in the short alphabet but found at Minet el-Beida, almost certainly knew of the canonical Ugaritic alphabet.

2) Following a suggestion from Rendsburger, Rainey, 53, notes the use of *HWY/HYY in Hebrew, Aramaic and Moabite. Phoenicain never uses any form of this root, nor did the "the Amarna scribes from Canaan" likely use it in their mother tongue. Nor is the root fount in Ugaritic. While my own observation is that Phoenician and Ugaritic avoid directly using any word in this semantic range, if it cannot be avoided they use words based on the root *KWN. In this context, Rainey, 55, also has an interesting of the origin of the discussion of the device name, יהוה.

3) Hebrew and Moabite use אשר as a common relative pronoun while Phoenician uses אש and later simply ש. Rainey, 53-54, suggests that אשר as relative pronoun comes from 'ašru, an "archaic noun" meaning "either 'place' or 'pace' and not from ašar, "wherever," as seen in the Amarna letters. I find Rainey's etymological argument questionable, but the indisputable facts are that Hebrew and Moabite use one word and Phoenician uses another for this important relative pronoun.

4) Unlike Hebrew, Moabite and Aramaic, neither Phoenician nor Amarna Canaanite uses the "syntagma of the narrative preterit" ( i.e. wa-conjunctive with a string of prefix preterite verbal forms).

So we see that at the phonetic, lexical and syntactical levels there are significant differences between Phoenician and Hebrew. Even more examples could be given. It is of course possible that, with patience, the two languages were mutually understandable, perhaps more so when written than when spoken. Our daughter-in-law who is a native speaker of both Catalan and Spanish, can communicate with a person who speaks only Italian. But there differences were more than "dialectal variants." Of course, we must always remember Max Weinreich's famous maxim, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."

Reference:

Posted by Duane Smith at September 20, 2007 8:43 AM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |

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Posted by: Chip at September 20, 2007 10:45 AM

Posted by: Duane at September 20, 2007 3:16 PM

Posted by: Chip at September 23, 2007 8:01 PM

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