Lecture | Summer School evening lectures
Remnants of the Semitic case system in Old Aramaic
- Date
- Tuesday 18 July 2023
- Time
- Series
- Summer School evening lectures
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 003
Abstract
The oldest and most conservative Semitic languages share a highly similar nominal case system, contrasting the nominative case with the genitive and accusative (in the singular) or oblique (in the dual and plural). Among the classical Semitic languages, Hebrew is a notable example of a language that has lost this case system, no longer marking the syntactic role of nouns by means of different suffixes. The same holds for Classical Syriac, Biblical Aramaic, and, it is generally assumed, all earlier attested forms of Aramaic.
In this talk, we will consider the word-final spelling of the feminine suffixes *-at- (singular) and *‑āt- (plural) in Old Aramaic. Reflexes of these suffixes are spelled with -t, -h, or left unspelled. Interestingly, these spellings are syntactically conditioned, with -t corresponding to contexts where the Semitic case system would dictate the use of the accusative and the other spellings occurring elsewhere. Together with the attestation in the Tell Fekheriye inscription of the spelling of the ‘masculine’ plural ending as -wn in nominative contexts and -yn elsewhere, corresponding to the reconstructed case endings *‑ūna (nom.) and *‑īna (obl.), this shows that Old Aramaic maintained a partial distinction between all three inherited cases, a distinction that may have been preserved in some dialects up to the middle of the first millennium BCE.