‘Woman’ in Modern South Arabian, Amorite, and Ugaritic

Some Modern South Arabian languages have a weird-looking word for ‘woman’: Mehri tēθ, Harsusi and Jibbali teθ. The θ makes it look similar to Proto-Semitic *ʔanθ–at-, which underlies Ugaritic a͗θt, Hebrew ʔiššā, Syriac <ʔntt-ʔ> at-o, Akkadian aššat- ‘wife’, etc. The same root also gives Arabic ʔunθ-ay– ‘female’1. But what about that initial t-?

For years, I’ve kind of assumed the Modern South Arabian words also come from something like *ʔanθ–at-, with the first part being lost and *θ-et then metathesizing to *teθ. It’s weird, but it was my best guess. But here’s a new guess I like better.

In late 2022 (paywalled), Andrew George and Manfred Krebernik published what they aptly referred to as “two remarkable vocabularies”, containing what is probably the first known connected text in Amorite, a Northwest Semitic language of the early second millennium BCE. One of the many surprises these texts contain is the word for ‘woman’ (unambiguously written with a Sumerogram in the Akkadian translation), ta-aḫ-ni-šum. Based on comparisons to the Semitic words above and known Amorite/Akkadian spelling conventions, this looks like *taʔnīθ-um, yet another different noun formation from the *ʔ-n-θ root. As I learned from a recent handout byTania Notarius, Ugaritic also attests a form that looks related: ti͗nθt ‘women’, ‘females’, plausibly /tiʔnīθ-āt-u/.

Both of these forms show a t- prefix, part of a pattern that usually forms abstracts—although concrete nouns in this pattern also occur, like Hebrew < Aramaic talmīḏ– ‘student’. And the Amorite, at least, lacks a feminine suffix. So that’s starting to look like our MSAL *teθ. Could this be a full cognate, with *teθ coming from *taʔnīθ-?

That depends on whether we can get rid of the first two radicals, *ʔ and *n. As far as I know, Proto-Semitic *ʔ was regularly lost on the way to Modern South Arabian. So that’s fine. What about *n, is this one of the (surprisingly) many branches of Semitic where it assimilates to following consonants? Let’s check out some likely etyma with *n before a consonant:

• PS *ʔanta ‘you (m.sg.)’ > Mehri, Harsusi hēt, Jibbali hɛt (if this is the right etymon)
• PS *ʔantum ‘you (m.pl.)’ > Mehri ətēm, Harsusi etōm, Jibbali tum, Soqotri ten
• PS *ʕVnz- ‘she-goat’ > Mehri, Harsusi wōz, Jibbali oz, Soqotri o’oz (? but then where did the *ʕ go? [update])

That’s all I’ve got, for now. The plural pronoun looks good, though. Of course, in *taʔnīθ-, the *n isn’t directly before the θ, so why should it assimilate? After assigning the stress to the first *a—a strange, but reliable rule in pre-MSAL—we could imagine something like
*táʔnīθ > *táʔnəθ (vowel reduction) >
*táʔənθ (metathesis) >
*táʔəθθ (assimilation) >
*teθθ (loss of the glottal stop, vowel contraction, MSAL vowel weirdness)
*teθ (degemination—not entirely clear whether this is regular).

Writing it out like that, the non-gemination of the θ (also word-internally, as in the Mehri dual tēθ–i) may also be a problem for assuming a derivation from the *ʔ-n-θ root.2 Still, this is commonly assumed; supporting evidence comes from the plural forms, like Mehri yənīθ, where the n is visible. So, since the t- in *teθ really does look like a prefix, I think Amorite *taʔnīθ- is an exciting form to compare.

1. And apparently “in the dual, obsolete” (Wiktionary), ‘testicles’. ↩︎
2. Or maybe it isn’t; none of the other potential examples of *n-assimilation yield geminates. Either way, reflexes of the *n are partially missing in some other languages where it should yield a geminate: Hebrew ʔḗšeṯ ‘wife of’ < *ʔiθ-t-, Akkadian alt- ‘wife’ < *ʔaθ-t-. I assume these are language-internal, ad hoc simplifications of the geminate, maybe triggered by the lack of stress in the frequent construct and pronominally possessed forms or by the creation of a pre-consonantal geminate when the short *-t- form of the feminine suffix was used. Perhaps that’s also what happened in MSAL, something like *teθθ–k ‘your wife’ > *teθ–k, with generalization of the *teθ base. ↩︎

#Akkadian #Amorite #Arabic #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #ProtoSemitic #Syriac #Ugaritic

A friend of mine is planning to name her baby Itamar, a name I like very much. In the Bible, It(h)amar is the youngest son of Aaron, the first High Priest.

The Internet and (some) Biblical Hebrew dictionaries alike will tell you that Itamar means ‘island of date palms’. Linguistically, this works out: אִי ʔī is ‘island’ or ‘coast’, תָּמָר tāmār is ‘date’ or ‘date palm’, so אִיתָמָר ʔīṯāmār is ‘date palm coast’. But this meaning seems strange to me. Modern Hebrew speakers love naming their children after natural features like gal ‘wave’, sháchar ‘dawn’, inbar ‘amber’, nir ‘plowed field’, and especially trees like ilan ‘tree’, óren ‘pine tree’, érez ‘cedar’, rótem ‘broom tree’, and of course tamar ‘date’ and tómer ‘date palm’, but this is less common in Biblical Hebrew (the main examples that come to mind are ʔēlōn ‘terebinth’ and ʔallōn ‘oak’, both still popular names). Could Itamar have a different origin?

No dates?

Apart from ‘island’ or ‘coast’, the syllable ʔī can also mean ‘no(ne)’, ‘not’. It features in this way in the names Ichabod (‘no glory’, a name given after the Ark of the Covenant was lost to the Philistines) and Jezebel (‘no prince’ or something like that), possibly a deformed version of a similar-sounding Phoenician name. In the same way, Itamar could be ‘no date’, ‘no date palm’. But honestly, this seems like an even less likely meaning than ‘date island’.

Egyptian?

A surprising number of Levites, including relatives of Aaron, have Egyptian names: Phineas (‘the Nubian’) is the least controversial example, but other candidates include Merari, Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. Together with the absence of Egyptian names among other tribes, this could indicate that it was the ancestors of the Levites in particular who sojourned in Egypt, later spreading the story of the Exodus to the rest of the Israelites. Since Itamar is a Levitical/Aaronid name, and the -mār is reminiscent of the Egyptian verb mrj ‘to love’, we might suspect an Egyptian etymology here too. But I haven’t come across any, and I don’t know enough Egyptian to think of any myself.

Akkadian?

If we ignore some typically Hebrew vowel lengthening processes, ʔīṯāmār looks exactly like a word in Akkadian, the distant relative of Hebrew that was spoken by the Assyrians, Babylonians, and some other Mesopotamian peoples. In Akkadian, the root a-m-r doesn’t mean ‘to speak’ as in Hebrew, but ‘to see’, while there’s also a uniquely Akkadian verb form, the Perfect, that is formed by inserting -ta- into the verb stem. As a result, ītamar is Akkadian for ‘he has seen’. What kind of a name is that?

Quite a sensible one, it turns out. Many Akkadian names form little sentences describing how one god or another has favoured the name bearer or the parents, things like aššur-uballiṭ ‘[the god] Ashur has brought to life’,1 sîn-aḫḫī-erība ‘[the moon god] Sin has replaced my brothers’ (Sennacherib), and so forth. This type of name was also extremely popular among the Amorites, an originally nomadic people who spoke a language that was more closely related to Hebrew and who founded various dynasties spanning the Fertile Crescent in the early second millennium BCE. Many Amorite names are also Amorite in language, e.g. yasmaʕ-haddu ‘[the god] Hadad has heard’. But interestingly, we also find names that combine Amorite and Akkadian elements, like itūr-ʔasdu ‘the warrior (Amorite) has returned (Akkadian)’ (source: Streck 2000). Another possible example is ʕammī-ištamru, which Howard (2023) explains as ‘I praised (Akkadian) my grandfather (Amorite)’. This last name is interesting because as discussed in the article I just cited, it spread west to areas where Akkadian was not spoken. So Amorite names could provide a vector for Akkadian verbs in names to spread to the Levant.

One last thing to consider is that these sentence names are also well attested in Hebrew, especially in the Patriarchal period. In יִשְׂרָאֵל yiśrāʔēl ‘God has fought’ (Israel) and יִשְׁמָעֵאל yišmāʕēl ‘God has heard’ (Ishmael), the full sentence is preserved. But in many cases, the subject was left off: יִצְחָק yiṣḥāq ‘he has laughed’ (Isaac), יַעֲקֹב yaʕăqōḇ ‘he has protected’ (Jacob), and יוֹסֵף yōsēp̄ ‘he has added’ (Joseph) are all abbreviated versions of Bronze Age names we know from cuneiform sources with meanings like ‘God has laughed’, ‘God has protected’, and ‘God has added’. Interestingly, this kind of abbreviation is already attested in the third millennium: Buccellati (1995: 858) notes that in Eblaite (a Syrian dialect or sister language of Akkadian), it is precisely the ta-perfect that only occurs in names that leave the subject off, like irtakas ‘he has bound’.

I don’t have easy access to a full overview of Amorite, Akkadian, and Eblaite names, but I think Streck’s (2000) index shows that a ta-perfect of a-m-r is attested in at least one Amorite name. That means that ītamar as a name element is not just hypothetical, but was certainly in use. So for now, my money is on Itamar being an etymologically Akkadian name, maybe mediated through Amorite, meaning ‘[God] has seen’. It’s no subtropical island, but placing your baby under divine supervision must also be worth something.

1. I’m going to translate the Akkadian iprus and Amorite yaqtul forms as perfects, even though they normally express perfective events. See this post. ↩︎

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/02/02/the-name-itamar/

#Akkadian #Amorite #Bible #Egyptian #Genesis #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernHebrew #onomastics

My article ‘Proto-Semitic existentials: *yθaw and *laθθaw‘ has just appeared in the Journal of Northwest Semitic languages and can be accessed for free at Academia.edu or (soon, I think) through the KU Leuven repository. Abstract:

“A historical relationship has long been suspected between the Northwest Semitic existential particles like Biblical Hebrew יֵשׁ and Biblical Aramaic אִיתַי, negative existentials like Syriac layt and Akkadian laššu, the Arabic negative copula laysa, and the East Semitic verbs i-ša-wu “to exist” (Eblaite) and išû “to have” (Akkadian). But due to various formal and semantic problems, no Proto-Semitic reconstruction from which all these words can regularly be derived has yet been put forward. This article argues that the Akkadian sense of “to have” is typologically the oldest and reconstructs a Proto-Semitic grammaticalization of *yiyθaw “it has” to *yθaw “there is/are”. Also in Proto-Semitic, a negative counterpart was formed through contraction with the negative adverb “not”, yielding *layθaw and *laθθaw.”

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/12/01/new-article-proto-semitic-existentials/

#Akkadian #Amorite #Arabic #Aramaic #Bible #Eblaite #Hebrew #linguistics #news #ProtoSemitic #Syriac

Ur was a city in the region of Sumer, southern Mesopotamia, and its ruins lie in what is modern-day Tell el-Muqayyar, Iraq. https://www.worldhistory.org/ur/ #History #Akkad #Amorite #City

The Amorites were a Semitic people who seem to have emerged from western Mesopotamia (modern-day Syria) at some point prior to the 3rd millennium BCE. https://www.worldhistory.org/amorite/ #History #Amorite #Hammurabi #Mesopotamia

A Lost Language Translated From Ancient Tablets Reveals Names of Gods in Stunning Find
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axjqm/a-lost-language-translated-from-ancient-tablets-reveals-names-of-gods-in-stunning-find
#Assyriology
#Akkadian
#Amorite
#ManfredKrebernik
#AndrewRGeorge

This is pretty cool 😎

#Amorite #language #precursor to Hebrew
#Akkadian #translation

#ancientTablets #ancientLanguages #extinctLanguage #lostLanguage

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axjqm/a-lost-language-translated-from-ancient-tablets-reveals-names-of-gods-in-stunning-find

Our knowledge of the Amorite language was so slight that some doubted its existence, and now we know the names of their gods.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axjqm/a-lost-language-translated-from-ancient-tablets-reveals-names-of-gods-in-stunning-find
#tech-science #worldnews #archaeology #amorite #language #History #Ancient #Abstract

The Amorites were a Semitic people who seem to have emerged from western Mesopotamia (modern-day Syria) at some point prior to the 3rd millennium BCE. In Sumerian they were known as the Martu or the Tidnum (in the Ur III Period), in Akkadian by the name of Amurru, and in Egypt as Amar, all of which mean 'westerners' or 'those of the west', as does the Hebrew name Amorite. They worshipped their ...https://www.worldhistory.org/amorite/ #Amorite #Hammurabi #Mesopotamia