Let me just start by saying that everything I wrote in that thread is several years old, from back when I was really just beginning to study comparative Semitic linguistics (informally). I'm certain there are plenty of mistakes, and I didn't intend it to be any sort of formal exposition. If I had my way, I'd have that museum thread deleted and I'd start over!
Richard W wrote:Which form of Hebrew has an epenthetic vowel in any but lamedh guttural verbs? Except in these vowels, there's a shewa under the consonant before the T, and it's taught as being a quiescent shewa.
In truth, the perfective 2SgFem forms have been something I've wondered about for a long time, though I haven't seen anything definitive said about them. The Proto-Semitic ending would have been *-ti, so the Proto-Semitic form of Hebrew הצלת would have been something like *sV-sʕalt-ti (don't quote me on that; it's off the top of my head). At some point that final *-i was lost, resulting in a final cluster. The question is how this was resolved, and to date I haven't seen any good discussion of the issue.
I see two possible options here. One, if the vowel loss happened early enough, would be that this verb form followed a similar path to the segolates. Segolate nouns originate in earlier final clusters (MHe kodeš "holy" < Proto-Semitic *qudš, sefer "book" < *sapr, etc). Pre-Biblical Hebrew at some point became intolerant of final clusters, and so inserted an epenthetic vowel, likely /ə/, and then these words underwent their own divergent vocalic evolution. It's possible that this happened in BibHe as well, so that this verb form came to be pronounced as *ʔiṣṣalət, but over time this schwa disappeared, giving Biblical hiṣṣalt. The reason I say this is because it just strikes me as very odd for pre-Biblical Hebrew, which was otherwise so consistent about eliminating final clusters, to have left behind this one glaring,
unitary exception.
The other option, of course, is that it really was pronounced as a final cluster. This just strikes my (admittedly not-fully-informed) self as less plausible, though certainly possible. For this to be so, however, the loss of final -i almost certainly must have happened
after the rise of segolate nouns, so that the process of epenthesis that created the segolates had finished by the time these new clusters were created. I don't know of the dating of either of these two events.
That said, you have to be careful about using Tiberian vocal marking when reconstructing pre-Tiberian forms of Hebrew. For all we know, that -ti might still have been pronounced in the early Biblical period. When the system of nikud was created, its inventors did not know how the language was pronounced a thousand, two thousand, or even more years earlier. I have read a few interesting articles, for example, that claim Biblical Hebrew actually preserved at least some of the Semitic dual pronouns. I don't remember where, but several locations in the Torah were refereneced where the word הן was vocalized as
hen (ie, "they (feminine)"), when given the context that was illogical (I believe two men were being referred to); the author instead suggested it represented the 3Dl pronoun (something like
henna), which would have been spelt the same way in the original Biblical Hebrew spelling system, but which would have been completely unknown to the Tiberians when they were working on vocalizing the texts.
However, getting back to the original question, you're right, I shouldn't have written in the extra schwa there without at least a footnote.
Richard W wrote:All the text books I consulted, including Gesenius, give this form as הצלתיני hiṣṣaltīnī.
Ah, interesting. My knowledge of Hebrew direct object enclitics was never really good; I just never dealt with them that much. It's interesting that they preserve the original Semitic ending *-ti intact, however. But I'm wondering why the vowel was lengthened...
