84 holger gzella
Kai 222 c: 25 and 223 B: 7 but, if this is indeed the same word, šm /šem/
‘name’ in 202 c: 2).
the loss of intervocalic /h/, which increasingly affected the “imperfect”
of the causative stem during the official aramaic period, already seems
to appear once in Sefire ( yskr /yasker/ ‘he shall deliver’ in Kai 224: 3; see
the discussion in the section on the verbal stems). the same phonetic
feature underlies the nonstandard forms kln and klm ‘all of them (fem.
and masc.)’ in tell fekheriye (Kai 309: 3.4.5). Later varieties of aramaic
have klhn and klhm, but there is no comparative evidence for these forms
in other old aramaic subcorpora.
Vowel shifts are even more elusive. cuneiform transcriptions of names
seem to point to an occasional change of /a/ to /e/ before syllablefinal /ʿ/,
/h/, or /ḥ/.33 the extent of the dissimilation of /a/ to /e/ in the preforma
tive vowel of the gstem “imperfect” remains controversial for older ara
maic; hence it is difficult to say whether the Barthginsberg Law, according
to which /yaktab/ regularly changed into /yiktab/ in canaanite and
ugaritic (and the /i/ vowel was subsequently generalized in the prefor
mative in vocalized hebrew and Syriac), was operative in the aramaic
varieties described here.34 Stress is mostly on the final syllable, except for
some pronouns and forms with certain suffixes and endings that exhibit
penultimate stress; there seem to be no special forms for sentencefinal
intonation (“pause”); inherited wordfinal short vowels had disappeared
by the time the first aramaic texts emerged.
- Morphology and Morphosyntax
4.1 Pronounsas in other Semitic languages, the independent personal pronouns mark
the subject in different types of nominal clauses (ʾš ʿnh ʾnh ‘i am a humble
man,’ Kai 202 a: 2; hʾ byt kyṣʾ ‘it was the summer mansion,’ Kai 216: 19)
and can reinforce it (e.g., for highlighting a contrast) together with finite
verbal forms, which also encode information on the person, number, and
gender of the agent. the paradigm is incomplete for the oldest texts but
33 Beyer 1984: 107.
34 according to Beyer 1984: 108–112, this change began in the 5th century B.c., whereas
Lipiński 1981: 192f assumes that it was already operative in old aramaic.