language and script 87
between persons, or animates, and things, or inanimates. they may pre
serve traces of an erstwhile more prominent role of animacy in Semitic.
no proper indefinite pronouns exist in old aramaic, but ʾnš /ʾenāš/ or
gbr /gabr/, in the Kuttamuwa stele also ʾš /ʾīš/ (l. 7), all meaning ‘man’,
can have generic, and presumably genderneutral, nuances (‘person’)
due to semantic bleaching, e.g., in the phrase kl gbr zy ‘everyone who’
(Kai 224: 1–2). a similar usage is attested for the numeral ḥd /ḥad/
‘one’ in mn byt ḥd mlkn rbrbn ‘than the house of any of the great kings’
(Kai 216: 13–14). its inanimate counterpart m(n)dʿm ‘something, anything’
only appears in official aramaic. these circumlocutions mirror the dis
tinction between animate and inanimate in the interrogatives, arguably
because gender is in most cases either unknown or irrelevant with inter
rogatives and indefinites. the interrogatives, too, can be used as indefinites:
kl mh ‘anything’ (Kai 216: 15).
4.2 Nounsnouns follow the usual rootandpattern system of derivation,43 which is
so typical for Semitic languages, and inflect for gender (masculine, femi
nine), number (singular, plural, and vestiges of the dual), and state (abso
lute, construct, emphatic). Morphological case marking collapsed around
1000 B.c. in northwest Semitic. the feminine plural absolute ending /ān/,
patterned after its masculine counterpart as opposed to common Semitic
*/āt/, which is still preserved in Samʾalian (cf. msgrt/masgirāt/ ‘prisons’
in Kai 215: 4.8), belongs to the typical features of aramaic, as does the
emphatic (or “determinative”) state. although direct evidence is lacking,
one may assume that old aramaic agrees with other northwest Semitic
languages in using a bisyllabic base /qVtal/ (i.e., with an additional /a/
between the second and the third root consonant) for the noun patterns
qatl, qitl, and qutl besides adding the customary plural endings. forms
confidently to be reconstructed on the basis of later evidence from official
aramaic are given in parentheses but they are as yet unattested in the
oldest aramaic texts:
43 unfortunately, the etymological patterns are not specified in the synopsis given by
degen 1969: 44–50, which is arranged according to the consonantal spellings and hence
does not reveal the pronunciation of these words in light of later transcriptions and
vocalizations. Much of the relevant information, however, can be found in Beyer 1984:
503–728.