THE AMERICAN ACADEMY FOR JEWISH RESEARCH MONOGRAPH SERIES, NO.3 Affricated Sade in the Semitic Languages BY RICHARD C. STEINER NEW YORK 1982 •~ j I To my dear parents il:n~J Cil'~' me 'il 1',M' Copyright© 1982 by The American Academy for Jewish Research 3080 Broadway, New York, New York 10027 Produced by Bet Sha'ar Press, Inc., New York, N.Y. Manufactured in the United States of America r Acknowledgments It would take a second monograph to give a complete account of the help I have received in writing this work. I am painfully aware of the inadequacy of the acknowledgments given here and in foot­ notes throughout the book. Thus, the thank-you's below should also be understood as apologies. Let me begin by thanking the many colleagues in the field of Semitics who answered questions, made suggestions, and provided references: Professors Z. Ben-I;Iayyim, H. Blanc, J. Blau, D. Boyarin, F. M. Cross, D. 0. Edzard, M. Goshen-Gottstein, G. Gragg, J. Greenfield, R. Hetzron, S. Hopkins, T. M. Johnstone, T. 0. Lambdin, S. J. Lieberman, J. Naveh, H. J. Polotsky, E. Porada, F. Rosenthal, Ch. Rabin, E. Reiner, S. Segert, M. Silverman and M. Stolper. I am particularly grateful to Professors Blau and Edzard for their detailed and penetrating comments on an earlier draft of the entire monograph. I would also like to thank the Iranists whom I consulted at every turn for their patient help: Professors C. Brunner, R. N. Frye, H. Paper, Sh. Shaked, G. Windfuhr, and M. Zand. I am particularly indebted to Prof. Shaked for the many improvements which he suggested in the sections dealing with Iranian. Even more over­ whelming is my debt to Prof. Brunner, who spent hour after hour on the telephone answering long lists of questions from a virtual stranger. For help with the Romance material in this monograph, I am indebted to Professors D. Bunis, S. Gaon, H. Guttel, G. Jochno­ witz, P. Lloyd, Ch. Merchavia, M. Serels, H. Soloveitchik, and Mrs. E. Skolnik. Prof. H. Z. Dimitrovsky has provided both data and invaluable bibliographical guidance in this area and a good number of others. Thanks also to Prof. L. Cuomo for providing me with a Vll Vlll RICHARD C. STEINER AFFRICATED $AD£ IN THE SEMITIC LANGUAGES lX copy of her Hebrew University dissertation and to Prof. S. Oster for and 1979. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Richler for responding transporting this massive work from Jerusalem to New York. with such alacrity to my several requests for manuscript readings My forays into Greek studies would not have been possible after I left Israel. And, of course, I am very grateful to the American without the generous help of Professors R. Dalven and D. Ger­ Academy for Jewish Research for honoring this work with a place shenson. Long conversations with Professors E. Ramp, K. Kazazis, in its Monograph Series, and to the editor of that series, Prof. I. E. and S. Levin were also of great value, as was a ms. reading supplied Barzilay, for his help and patience. by Prof. L. Marwick. For help with Turkic, I am indebted to Pro­ Last but not least, I would like to express my loving gratitude to fessors R. Austerlitz, T. Halasi-Kun, R. Hetzron, 0. Pritsak, M. my wife and children, my parents and parents-in-law, and all the Zand, and Mrs. E. Skolnik. A copy of an important Georgian rest of my family for the help, encouragement, and love which they article (Shanidze 1957), published in an extraordinarily inaccessible have given me. journal, was finally obtained (after a world-wide search lasting over a year) and translated with the help of Professors J. Assfalg and J. i''!il9DW ,~,;~ N. Birdsall and Messrs. N. Koziashvili and G. Tsitsuashwili. Mr. i''~t'LI'?. '"!~:P Tsitsuashwili also supplied valuable information about the Jews of i''lPLI'? i1~~9~ Georgia. Prof. H. Aronson checked the Georgian and Russian data v''P~~-~ x7 ,w~ adduced here, and Prof. R. Channon suggested improvements in i''!il~ '"1~iJ 'il my discussion of the Cyrillic alphabet. Important contributions i''T:l~ '"! Xl(:j!~:p were made by Professors K. Baer (Egyptian), S. R. Ramsey (Chi­ i''9~15 x7 co?~ nese), M. Stone (Armenian), and R. Oswalt (Porno), as well. i'"'"!¥v i''"!¥15 ,~ A number of institutions have helped bring this monograph into existence. The American Council of Learned Societies and the R.C.S. Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture provided financial sup­ November 6, 1980 port. The Bernard Revel Graduate School of Yeshiva University, under the direction of Professors H. Soloveitchik and (subse­ quently) S. Z. Leiman, provided the working conditions and intel­ lectual climate necessary for research. The staff of the Gottesman Library of Yeshiva University eagerly supplied the materials I needed for my research, and two of its librarians, Messrs. Sh. Klein and Z. Erenyi, provided bibliographic assistance. The Stanford Phonology Archive sent me computer print-outs free of charge. The Hebrew University Language Traditions Project, under the direc­ tion of Prof. Sh. Morag, and the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts of the Jewish National and University Library, under the direction of Drs. M. Bet-Arie and (subsequently) B. Richler, made their resources available to me during the summers of 1976 Contents 1. Introduction 1.1 The Affricate Hypothesis: Past and Present 1.2 Methodology 6 2. Hebrew 11 2.1 China 11 2.2 Iran 13 2.3 Caucasus 15 2.4 Southern Russia (Khazars, Karaites, Krimchaks) 17 2.5 Turkey (Romaniotes) 19 2.6 Greece and Crete (Romaniotes) 23 2.7 Italy 25 2.8 Bohemia 27 2.9 Germany 27 2.10 Northern France 28 2.11 Southern France 32 2.12 Christian Spain and Portugal 37 2.13 Egypt 40 2.14 Palestine 41 3. Aramaic 45 3.1 Georgia 45 3.2 Armenia 47 3.3 Mesopotamia and Iran 50 3.4 Central Asia and China 56 3.5 Egypt 57 xu RICHARD C. STEINER 4. Canaanite 60 4.1 North Africa and Sardinia 60 4.2 Aegean Region 65 4.3 Canaan 68 1. Introduction 5. Akkadian 70 5.1 Iran 70 5.2 Anatolia and Northern Mesopotamia 73 1.1 The Affricate Hypothesis - Past and Present Most Semitists today believe that in ancient times the Hebrew :11 6. Arabic 75 was pronounced as an emphatic [s] rather than an emphatic [1§],1 but this has not always been the case. Until the second quarter of 7. Ethiopian Semitic 82 the nineteenth century, Semitists transcribed and described :11 as an affricate. Gesenius (1817:21), for example, held that both :11 and T 8. Affricated $ade and the Triadic System of Semitic 84 were originally affricates, the former being composed of u plus s. Ewald (1827:27-28) also espoused this theory at first, explaining 9. Conclusions 90 the (allegedly) fricative :It of the Septuagint and Jerome and the fricative $ of modern Syriac and Arabic as a later development. Appendix A 93 Less than twenty years later, however, Ewald (1844:55) was de­ scribing :It as a fricative, although he left it to others (e.g. Bottcher Appendix B 95 1866-85) to explicitly reject his earlier view. By the last quarter of the century, the affricated realization of :It had lost all credibility in List of References 97 scholarly circles. In the words of Olshausen (1879:565-66): "Auch wird diese Aussprache zur Zeit ziemlich allgemein als eine unbe­ Index 121 rechtige, ausgeartete angesehen." Olshausen (ibid., 565-70) attempted to soften this negative view by presenting a collection of nine names and loanwords in which 1 In this monograph, affricates are represented as [t§], [~]. [t§], and [<ti] in phonetic notation. In graphemic and phonemic notation, I use c for [t§], c for [ti], (even in Middle Iranian and Sanskrit) and g or J for [dz], except in transliterating Egyptian, where g has the value [ti] and c has the value [ti']. Greek, Arabic and, in some places, New Persian are given in their own scripts, but Syriac, like other Aramaic dialects and Hebrew, is given in square script. All other languages are transliterated, except in quotations and in the rare instances where the untransliter­ ated forms are more revealing. ,. l 2 RICHARD C. STEINER AFFRICATED SAD£ IN THE SEMITIC LANGUAGES 3 Semitic $ renders or is rendered by Iranian c, Egyptian g, or Greek This revolutionary (and overstated4) concept was later to be deve­ r. Additional evidence of this type was later to be adduced by loped by Vilenchik (1930:91-92) and Martinet (1953:71). Vilenchik (1930:91-92, 1931:505-6), Cantineau ([1951-52] The work of Olshausen, Haupt, and later (1907) Hiising made no 1960:283), and Cardona (1968:5-13). impression on the authors of the monumental Hebrew grammars A few years later, Haupt (1890:261-62) reviewed Olshausen's published in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Joiion evidence in a long footnote, adding very little of a concrete nature (1923: 16) was still able to denounce the affricated las un-Semitic,5 l! except for a parenthetical allusion to the affricated2 $ of Ethiopian and Bergstrlisser (1918:41-42) was still able to ignore it completely. Semitic. On the theoretical level, however, Haupt's contribution Indeed some scholars succeeded in overlooking not only the work (ibid., 261) was considerable. He was the first to posit the existence of their predecessors in this area but their own as well. Noldeke of a connection between what we may call the "affricate hypothesis" (1898:4), for example, made a point of warning students of Syriac (the hypothesis that ancient Hebrew l had an affricated realization) not to pronounce l like German z, despite the fact that on two and what we may call the "ejective hypothesis" (the hypothesis that earlier occasions (1879a: 148 fn, 1879b:396fn) he himself had $ and the other emphatic consonants were produced with glottalic pointed out that the usual Syriac equivalent of c in Persian names pressure in all of the Semitic languages except Arabic): and loanwords is l.