The Canaanite Shift

chapter 3 The Canaanite Shift

3.1 Introduction

The Canaanite Shift is one of the better-known sound changes to have affected Biblical Hebrew. Phonetically, it is uncomplicated: at some point, some cases of Proto-Northwest-Semitic *ā shifted to *ō in an ancestor of Hebrew, resulting well-being’, to reflexes of‘ םוֹלָשׁ in correspondences of Biblical Hebrew o, as in *ā in other languages, as in Aramaic šlām, Arabic salāmun, Gəʕəz salām, and Akkadian /šalāmu/. As Proto-Northwest-Semitic did not have a phonemic *ō vowel, this change of *ā > *ō would originally have been phonetic, only reach- ing a phonemic status when new cases of *ā were created by the contraction of triphthongs (see below and Chapter 5). Besides Hebrew, this sound change is also attested in Phoenician and Amarna Canaanite, hence its identification as a shared Canaanite innovation. Cognates of the Phoenician and Amarna Canaanite examples and counterexamples of the Canaanite Shift all occur in Biblical Hebrew, where they show the same behaviour, so these languages do not add anything to the investigation of the Canaanite Shift’s conditioning (Suchard 2012). Consequently, they will not be discussed in this chapter. The controversy surrounding the Canaanite Shift is due to a number of apparent exceptions, where ā-vowels in other languages correspond to Bibli- cal Hebrew å, not **o. As sound laws should be exceptionless, this has led to two approaches which aim to resolve this problem (Huehnergard 2013b). Either the Canaanite Shift is given a relatively restrictive conditioning, which then, together with analogy, explains the anomalous cases of å for expected **o, or the reconstructions of the supposed counterexamples are revised, showing that they did not contain *ā at the time of the Canaanite Shift and could therefore not have been affected by it. After a brief consideration of various previous pro- posals, we will attempt to combine these approaches, first making sure that only words and grammatical categories with reconstructible *ā are taken into account, and then establishing phonetically plausible conditions which ade- quately explain the reflex of *ā in these words. Three important groups of words which did not undergo the Canaanite Shift nominals. We shall לָטַּק are the II-wy and III-wy classes of weak verbs and the see that based on comparative evidence, the å vowels in the former two should qawama* > םָק .be reconstructed as deriving from so-called triphthongs, e.g banaya; assuming that this triphthong contraction postdated the* > הָנָבּ and

Canaanite Shift, this explains their non-participation (see further Chapter 5). nominals, on the other hand, can derive from *qaṭṭal- patterns, as לָטַּק The argued, for instance, by Huehnergard (2015, 51). Thus, none of these categories provides evidence for the operation of the Canaanite Shift. As the words which can securely be reconstructed with Proto-Northwest- Semitic *ā show no evidence of stress conditioning, I will argue for a Canaanite Shift that was not conditioned by the stress. Based on a few counterexamples, the presence of *u or *w in the preceding syllable will be argued to have blocked the Canaanite Shift. This leads me to posit a dissimilatory sound change of *u to *i next to bilabial consonants, which is needed to explain the operation of the Canaanite Shift in several words with Proto-Northwest-Semitic *u in the preceding syllable.

3.2 Previous Suggestions

3.2.1 Stress-Conditioned Like many later scholars, Brockelmann (1908, 142–143) holds that the Canaan- ite Shift only affected stressed vowels, formulating it as *ā́ > *ṓ. Unstressed and הָכָ֫כּ secondarily stressed syllables kept *ā, giving rise to interchanges such as like me’, etc. Nouns would originally‘ יִנוֹ֫מָכּ what’ but‘ הָמ ,’idem‘ הֹכּ thus’ but‘ have shown a similar interchange, as the position of the stress varied through- out the paradigm, but either the *ā or the *ō was then generalized. This then cook’, formed after the plural‘ חָבַּט resulted in some apparent exceptions like ṭabbāḫīma.́ The observation that the Canaanite Shift took place in* > םיִחָבַּט as well as a few other forms that show an o which , לֵטֹק the qal active participle is never stressed in Biblical Hebrew, leads Brockelmann to posit the same stress system as is found in Classical Arabic (but see Chapter 4) for Proto-Canaanite, in which the stress falls on the last heavy non-final syllable of a word (‘heavy’ meaning closed or containing a long vowel), or, if the word does not contain any heavy syllables, on the first syllable. Thus, *qā́ṭilum, the Proto-Northwest- pattern, would have an accented *ā́, which לֵטֹק Semitic reconstruction of the then underwent the Canaanite Shift.1

1 Note that I reconstruct the word-final absolute state marker *-m, known as mimation, for the singular and feminine plural of the Proto-Northwest-Semitic nominal paradigms. Since mimation on these forms has been lost in Iron Age Canaanite (including Hebrew), Ara- maic, and Ugaritic, Proto-Northwest-Semitic forms are often reconstructed without it, too, as in *qāṭilu. There are several arguments for the retention of mimation in Proto-Northwest- Semitic, however: 1) traces are retained in the individual Northwest Semitic languages, most