The Aramaeans in Ancient Syria

(avery) #1

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.

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