language and script 107
instead of the usual aramaic and Samʾalian form hwī.114 individual words
could also have been borrowed from indigenous (anatolian?) idioms.115
extensive aramaicassyrian bilingualism in the eastern part of the speech
area, by contrast, has led to many akkadian lexemes in the tell fekheriye
stele (e.g., ʾdqwr /ʾadaqūr/ ‘ritual container’, gwgl /gūgal/ ‘irrigation mas
ter’, mt /māt/ ‘land’, and perhaps šbṭ /šibṭ/ ‘plague’) and other contact
induced phenomena such as the incidental “enclitic mem” in šmym ‘my
name’. further borrowings from akkadian, such as krsʾ /korseʾ/ ‘throne’,
are also attested in western Syria.
114 pardee 2009a: 68; nebe 2010: 325. this is especially interesting since the known vari
eties of phoenician use the root kūn for ‘to be’, even though hyī occurs in other canaanite
languages like hebrew and Moabite. in addition to that, a shift from /w/ to /y/ or vice versa
can be easily explained on phonetic grounds (see the variation between the object mark
ers (ʾ)yt and wt). as a consequence, the root hyī in the Kuttamuwa inscription does not
necessarily constitute a phoenician loan; its origin remains open to further discussion.
alternatively, yhy could be parsed as a “short imperfect” of the usual root hwī in aramaic
and Samʾalian, with omission of the medial /w/, as sometimes happens in later Western
aramaic (for examples, see Beyer 1984: 560; id. 2004: 383), but the syntactic environment
presupposes a “long imperfect”: cf. note 104, above.
115 nebe 2010: 315 cites two religious terms in the Ördekburnu inscription that may
have been borrowed from Luwian. anatolian names also feature in the Samʾalian ono
masticon.