Sound change in the Hebrew reading tradition

Abstract

This contribution to Language Change in Epic Greek and Other Poetic Traditions investigates for Biblical Hebrew “to what degree this corpus retained its phonological independence from the vernacular forms of Hebrew and Aramaic spoken by the people who transmitted it”. The text of the Hebrew Bible was fixed early on, but it does not write vowels and has a simplified spelling also in other respects. On the other hand, vocalizations as codified in the Tiberian reading tradition show that the text of the Hebrew Bible was also orally transmitted. I argue that these vocalizations provide evidence for two categories of sound change affecting the orally transmitted text: vowel changes that also occurred in the (Hebrew or Aramaic) vernacular, and vowel changes that have no parallel in the vernacular. There is thus evidence that the Hebrew reading tradition resisted vernacular sound changes, and even that it underwent sound changes that did not take place in the vernacular. I propose that these changes took place while Hebrew was still a spoken language.