Journal of the American Oriental Society (Volume 22) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Names of the Hebrew Vowels.1?By Paul Haupt, Professor in Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md. In a footnote of my paper on the semi-vowel u in Assyrian, published fourteen years ago in the second volume of the Zeits- schriftfttr Assyriologie? I remarked that the references in 6 of Gesenius-Kautsch's Hebrew Grammar to the phonetic works of Britcke, Merkel, Sievers, Sweet, Techmer, Vietor, Trautmann, etc., seemed to figure merely as a traditional ornament, and that a short talk of fifteen minutes with Sievers would undoubtedly induce the distinguished editor of Gesenius' work to undertake a radical transformation of that paragraph. I found it necessary to point out to such eminent Semitic scholars as Professor N8l- deke, of Strassburg, and the late Professor Paul de Lagarde, of Gottingen, that the English th was neither an aspirates. nor an affricata but a spirans, adding that Indo-European scholars who happened to see those remarks would perhaps be surprised that I deemed it necessary to discuss the elements of phonetics.3 I also called attention4 to the fact that we found an exact analogy to the spiration of Hebrew postvocalic b, g, d, p, k, t in Celtic; but Semitic scholars do not seem to pay any attention to phonetics. In the Oxford translation of the latest edition of Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar,' the modification of postvocalic J"l)DT!Q is still 1 Read at the meeting of the American Oriental Society in New York, April, 1901. 2 Leipzig, 1887, p. 263, n. 2. 3 Cf. the remarks at the end of note 3 on p. 20 of my Sumerische Familiengesetze (Leipzig, 1879). 4 See my paper On the pronunciation of tr in Old Persian in Johns Hopkins University Circulars, No. 59 (August, 1887), p. 117b; C. F. Leh- i,unit,. SamaSSumukin, part 2 (Leipzig, 1892), p. 103" s. v. Cf. al...