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October 25, 2008

On The Selective Use Of Linguistic Data

The other day I accused Anson Rainey of selectively using linguistic data to make a point about the origins of the Hebrew language and the people who spoke it. In an earlier post I listed most, if not all, of Rainey's examples and gave a couple of counter examples of my own.

I decided to do a little experiment. I make no claim of completeness. First, I went through Garr's table, 206-214, of isoglosses between various North West Semitic languages and noted those where Hebrew agreeds with Phoenician, more or less unambiguously, over against Aramaic. I may have missed one or two but here is I what found.

[If you see squares, rectangles or something else that doesn't look right, please install the Charis SIL font.]

Correspondence of *ḍ
Correspondence of *ā
Correspondence of *ȃ
Definite Article
1st person plural
Niphal stem
Qal infinitive construct ending

There are other examples where there the evidence of such agreement against Aramaic has some problems like multiple forms that made the situation less clear but still interesting.

In a paper that Rainey presented at the SBL meeting in San Diego last year, he faulted Garr for not considering vocabulary. So I decided to take a look at that too. In an effort to control for loanwords, I tried to confine myself to lexemes that would appear on a Swadesh lists. I used Bennett to cheat. I provide only the Hebrew/Phoenician cognates. In every case, the Aramaic lexemes defer. I also excluded lexemes whose differences in Aramaic are solely dependent on well understood phonetic correspondences. With the further understanding that there cannot be certainty of agreement as to vowel structure, here is my first pass at finding common lexemes in Hebrew and Phoenician where the Aramaic is clearly different.

Come - bʾ
Door - dl
Enter - bʿ
Field - ś/šd
Many - rbm (but see Syriac)
Sheep - š
Son - bn
Two - šn(y)m

To these, one might add "go," "love," "mountain," "who" and several others but in these cases more explanation would be required than I care to give here. I may have missed other examples.

What does all this amount to? Very little. It demonstrates no more and no less than the several abnormally interesting isoglosses that Rainey found between Hebrew and Aramaic where they differ from Phoenician. And yes, there are isoglosses common to Phoenician and Aramaic that are not found in Hebrew. If I had do use this linguistic stew, without statistical analysis, to derive the origin of any of these languages, I'd be hard put to come up with any coherent answer. Even with statistical analysis like the Markov chain Monte Carlo method, one still might only see the same linguistic stew. My own tentative view, and it is not unique, is that these languages along with Ammonite, Moabite and others developed in the Late Bronze Age or very Early Iron Age I period from a stew of related city dialects, regional dialects and perhaps even idioglossia that formed a dialect continuum. In some places and under unclear circumstances this dialect continuum became discontinuous so that some, recognizable, independent dialects and languages emerged.

Please remember and never forget the saying usually attributed to an anonymous auditor of a lecture series on the history of Yiddish and reported by Max Weinreich, "A language is a dialect with an army and navy."

References:

Posted by Duane Smith at October 25, 2008 4:06 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |

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Posted by: N. T. Wrong at October 25, 2008 9:47 PM

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