The Semantics of Word Division in Northwest Semitic Writing Systems

Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite and Greek

Robert S.D. Crellin

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781789256789
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Much focus in research on alphabetic writing systems has been on correspondences between graphemes and phonemes. The present study sets out to complement these by examining the linguistic denotation of markers of word division in several ancient Northwest Semitic (NWS) writing systems, namely, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Moabite, and Hebrew, as well as alphabetic Greek. While in Modern European languages words on the page are separated on the basis of morphosyntax, I argue that in most NWS writing systems words are divided on the basis of prosody: 'words' are units which must be pronounced together with a single primary accent or stress, or as a single phrase. After an introduction providing the necessary theoretical groundwork, Part I considers word division in Phoenician inscriptions. I show that word division at the levels of both the prosodic word and of the prosodic phrase may be found in Phoenician, and that the distributions match those of prosodic words and prosodic phrases in Tiberian Hebrew. The latter is a source where, unlike the rest of the material considered, the prosody is well represented. In Part II, word division in Ugaritic alphabetic cuneiform is analyzed. Here two-word division strategies are identified, corresponding broadly to two genres of text: viz, literary, and administrative documents. Word division in the orthography of literary and of some other texts separates prosodic words. By contrast, in many administrative (and some other) documents, words are separated on the basis of morphosyntax, anticipating later word division strategies in Europe by several centuries. Part III considers word division in the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition of Biblical Hebrew. Here word division is found to mark out 'minimal prosodic words'. I show that this word division orthography is also found in early Moabite and Hebrew inscriptions. Word division in alphabetic Greek inscriptions is the topic of Part IV. Whilst it is agreed that word division marks out prosodic words, the precise relationship of these units to the pitch accent and the rhythm of the language is not so clear, and consequently this issue is addressed in detail. Finally, the Epilogue considers the societal context of word division in each of the writing systems examined, to attempt to discern the rationales for the prosodic word division strategies adopted. Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) is a project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 677758), and based in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1. What is a word?

It might at first seem obvious what words are: sequences of letters separated by spaces or punctuation. So in the sentence you have just read, ‘It’, ‘might’ and ‘seem’ would all be ‘words’.

Matters become more complicated when we encounter languages and writing systems that appear not to follow our instincts on what constitutes a ‘word’. A case in point, and a writing system that will feature heavily in the present study, is Hebrew. Here word division follows rather different principles. To illustrate, consider the opening verse of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible (transcription and glossing given immediately below):¹

Reading right-to-left we can see that there are sequences of letters interspersed by spaces, and terminating in a mark that looks like punctuation, a colon. So at a first glance, word division in Hebrew appears to be similar to word division in, for example, modern English. But when these sequences are analysed to see what they contain, it is immediately apparent that the principles of word division are different. The most notable difference is that one-letter words are written together with the next word:

(2) Gen 1:1

‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’ (KJV)²

Units joined by the = sign in the transcription correspond to a single word in the Hebrew text. From this we can see that several small words are written together with the next word:

• Preposition -

b- ‘in’:

b=ršyt ‘in beginning’

• Article

ha- ‘the’:

h-šmym ‘the heavens’

• Conjunction

w- ‘and’:

w=’t ‘and OBJ’

• Article

ha- ‘the’:

h-’rṣ ‘the earth’

Adopting the word division orthography of Hebrew for English would give us:

(3) Inthebeginning God created theheavens and theearth.

Genesis 1:1 is by no means unique. In fact, this approach to word division, where small words are written together with the next word is a feature of the writing of many Semitic languages, including Ugaritic, Phoenician and Moabite in the ancient world, and Modern Hebrew and Arabic today. We can see the same thing, for example, in the following excerpt from an early 1st millennium BCE Phoenician inscription from Byblos:

(4) KAI⁵ 1:2

As the transcription shows, the conjunction

w- ‘and’ and the preposition

b- ‘among’ are written together with the words that follow them.

It is perhaps not so widely known, however, that a subset of Ancient Greek inscriptions from the first half of the 1st millennium BCE adopt a very similar approach to word division. The following is an excerpt of an inscription from the Greek city of Argos, in the Peloponnese, from the 6th century BCE:³

(5) SEG 11:314 1–3 (Argos, 575–500 BCE; text per Probert & Dickey 2015)

In this inscription words are separated by tripuncts

rather than by spaces, which was the method of word division in the Hebrew example given earlier. But in terms of what is separated, there is a remarkable degree of similarity to what we find in Hebrew:

(6) SEG 11:314 1–3 (Argos, 575–500 BCE; text per Probert & Dickey 2015)

Once again, the = sign is used to denote items that are written together in the original text. We find the same kinds of words written together with the following words as we did in Genesis 1 verse 1:

• Preposition ΕΠΙ epí ‘on’: ΕΠΙΤΟΝΔΕΟΝΕΝ epì=tōndeōnḗn ‘while the following’;

• Article τά tá ‘the’:

tà=poiwḗmata ‘the works’;

• Conjunction ΚΑΙ kaí ‘and’: ΚΑΙΤΑΧΡΕΜΑΤΑΤΕ kaì=tà=khrḗmatá=te ‘and the treasures and’.

Unlike Hebrew and other West Semitic languages, this writing convention has not been carried through into modern Greek texts, either in Modern or Ancient Greek. Thus in the recent publication of this inscription by Probert & Dickey (2015), the text is written as follows, with spaces between morphosyntactic words (see also fn 3; Probert & Dickey indicate line division with new lines):

Modern editions therefore disguise a fundamental similarity between two sets of writing systems, those of the ancient Northwest Semitic languages Phoenician, Ugaritic, Hebrew and Moabite, on the one hand, and Greek on the other. The primary goal of this study is to establish the principles that govern word division in these writing systems: why did the writers of these texts separate words in the way that they did? Was it conventional only, or can a rationale be discerned? This question occupies the main part of the monograph, Parts I–IV, with one part devoted to each of Phoenician, Ugaritic, Hebrew/Moabite and Greek. I conclude that – with one exception in a subset of Ugaritic texts – that words are divided according to the principles under which units are divided in the spoken language, rather than those that would be implied by a grammatical analysis. In the Epilogue I go on to address what this fact can tell us about the world in which the writers of the inscriptions operated, and in particular, what it might tell us about the relationship between the written and the spoken word in their societies.

The introduction proceeds as follows. First in §1.2 I provide the rationale for the languages and writing systems considered in this study, that is, why I treat Northwest Semitic and Ancient Greek together. Sections 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5 consider the linguistics of word division. After that I outline how the question of word division in Northwest Semitic and Greek has been addressed in previous studies (§1.6). Finally in §1.7 I outline the method used in this study to assess the nature of word division.

1.2. Why Northwest Semitic and Greek?

The present study addresses word division in alphabetic Northwest Semitic and Greek inscriptions up to the mid-1st millennium BCE. However, these languages and their epigraphic practices are rarely studied together, except in the context of Biblical Studies. This is particularly true in the study of the target of word division, where from §1.6 it will be seen that the study of this question has followed quite different paths in the two academic disciplines. Consequently a word of explanation is needed as to why the two are studied together here.

1.2.1. Common origin of the Northwest Semitic and Greek alphabets

Northwest Semitic languages and Greek are generally studied separately from one another because they represent two different language families, viz. Semitic and Indo-European. However, the alphabets used to write these two language sub-branches have a common ancestor: as is well known, the Greek alphabet represents a development of an alphabet used to write a West Semitic language (Naveh 1973a, 1; Waal 2018, 84). The view among Greek scholars has tended to be that this Semitic language was Phoenician, and that the alphabet was adopted by Greek-speakers in the late 9th or early 8th century BCE (Waal 2020, 110, 121; 2018, 88). Naveh (1973a) challenged the prevailing view of the origin and date of transmission of the Greek alphabet, proposing a date of transmission in the 11th century BCE.⁴ The main arguments for an early transmission date of the Greek alphabet may be summarised as follows (Naveh 1973a; Waal 2018; 2020). First, in the earliest Greek inscriptions the direction of writing is not fixed, varying between left-to-right, right-to-left, and ‘boustrophedon’, i.e. where the direction of writing alternates between left-to-right and right-to-left (Waal 2018, 87). This is a property shared with Northwest Semitic inscriptions from the 2nd millennium BCE (Waal 2018, 85). By contrast, in the extant Phoenician inscriptions from the late 2nd/early 1st millennium BCE, the writing direction is fixed, right-to-lef...