90 holger gzella
in the Sefire inscriptions, which exhibit a somewhat more widespread use
of the emphatic state for definiteness marking, the majority of instances
are still constructionbound in that they appear before a demonstrative
or the relative marker.52
the “construct” state (or “bound form”), on the other hand, establishes
a stress unit with the noun that immediately follows it and thus expresses
a genitive relationship. chains of more than one construct noun are also
possible, but a construct noun modifying more than one nonconstruct
element is generally avoided.53 if the last element of a construct phrase
is formally definite (i.e., a proper name, a suffixed noun, or a noun in the
emphatic state), the entire phrase counts as definite. due to the bound
character of a construct phrase, the inherited fem. singular and plural
endings /at/ and /āt/ have been preserved. constructs constitute the
usual form of rendering a genitive relationship in old aramaic. however,
the functional overlap of the emerging analytical expression with the rela
tive marker zy /ðī/ as a nota genitivi, which only plays a greater role in
later forms of aramaic, appears already in the parallelism between dmwtʾ
zy hdysʿy ‘the image of haddayisʿi’ (Kai 309: 1) and ṣlm hdysʿy ‘the statue
of haddayisʿiʼ (Kai 309: 12) in tell fekheriye.54
While aramaic agrees with other northwest Semitic languages attested
after 1000 B.c. in that the morpheme /ay/, formally similar (and perhaps
identical) to the dual, serves as the construct ending for the masc. plural,
the retention of more archaic construct forms constitutes the distinctive
hallmark of Samʾalian. for prior to the breakdown of inflectional case
marking, northwest Semitic in the 2nd millennium B.c. distinguished, in
the masc. plural, between a nominative ending /ūma/ (with “mimation”)
or /ūna/ (with “nunation”) and a corresponding genitiveaccusative end
ing /īma/ or /īna/. the construct forms, on the other hand, simply
ended in the long case vowel without /ma/ or /na/, respectively. this
was still the situation in ugaritic. after the loss of short unstressed word
final vowels, the genitiveaccusative form (presumably being the more
52 Lambdin 1971: 318f. this pattern thus resembles the use of the emerging definite
article in phoenician; see gzella 2006a.
53 the alleged exception gwgl šmyn wʾrq ‘the irrigationmaster of heaven and earth’
(Kai 309: 2) in tell fekheriye is presumably a calque based on the corresponding divine
title in akkadian, which has two consecutive genitives (gú-gal šamê u erṣeti, line 1 of the
akkadian version).
54 the use of zy in the former expression right in the opening sentence may have been
influenced by the standard West Semitic format of dedicatory inscriptions (cf. Kai 202
a: 1).