encoding of the object throughout the historyivka.rsuh.ru/binary/78809_33.1385144744.99523.pdftial...

Encoding of the Direct Object throughout the History of the Aramaic Language*

Maksim Kalinin [email protected]

Sergey Loesov [email protected]

Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow The present paper is the first part of a comprehensive inquiry into direct object encoding within the whole of Aramaic, including Modern Aramaic. Both nominal and pronominal direct objects are considered. The paper starts with a theoretical introduction dealing with differential object marking. It is followed by sections analyzing the expression of the direct object in eighth-century B. C. texts (Old Western Aramaic), Mesopotamian Aramaic of the Neo-Assyrian period, and Egyptian Aramaic of the Achaemenid period. The study has reached new results along the well-trodden research paths through the early monumental inscriptions and Egyptian Aramaic. In particular, the functions of the pre-nominal direct ob-ject markers !yt and l- have been redefined. Keywords: Differential object marking, history of Aramaic, Sefire inscriptions,

Mesopotamian Aramaic, Egyptian Aramaic, direct object markers !yt and l- 0. Introduction

The direct object (= DirObj) of a verb can be expressed by a noun or a pronoun. In this study we will describe the ways the verb interacts with both kinds of DirObjs in all pre-modern Aramaic varieties and touch upon the situation in Modern Aramaic. We will not discuss clausal com-plements. A speculative calculus of syntactic slots and their fillings, based on

one’s general acquaintance with Aramaic, looks as follows: 1) DirObj is a noun: it is introduced by a prefixed differential object

marker (= DOM) or by Ø. The choice may depend (among other things)

* We thank Peter Arkadiev, Ilya Arkhipov, Eitan Grossman, Stephen Kauf-

man, and Aaron Rubin for their comments and suggestions. We are grateful to Boris Aleksandrov, Ilya Khait, and Olga Vinnichenko who provided us with some otherwise unavailable scholarly materials. A special thanks goes to Kenny Bendik-sen for helping us improve our writing.

2 Articles: Semitic Studies on animacy and/or definiteness of the DirObj. The verb may take a bound object pronoun indexing the nominal DirObj that is marked with a DOM (the qatl-eh l-malkā ‘he killed-him to-the-king’ construction). For the purposes of this study, DOM is an analytical marker that flags certain nominal DirObjs to the exclusion of others, which remain unmarked. The concept was first introduced in Bossong 1983–1984 and Bossong 1985. (Note that in the linguistic literature DOM often means “differen-tial object marking” as well and may refer to various kinds of markers, e. g., to case endings.) 2) DirObj is a pronoun: it is bound (or “hosted”) on a DOM or on the

verb itself. In the latter case, in certain Aramaic varieties there may ap-pear linking elements between the verb and the pronoun. The best-known and most controversial of them is “the presuffixal nun,” usually called “nun energicum.” In the study, we look at the ways these possibilities take shape in indi-

vidual Aramaic idioms.

One last word before we start: pre-modern Aramaic had two analytical DOMs, *!iyāt and l-. This fact invites two comments. First, we will see that the functions (or “meanings”) of the two Aramaic DOMs are different, i. e., they are not synonymous syntactic devices. This is important for the study of differential object marking in the world’s languages, as well as for the understanding of individual Aramaic varieties. Second, *!iyāt and l- do not co-occur as productive prenominal markers in the same dialect. For this reason, their dialectal distribution is significant for research into the historical dialectology of Aramaic, in particular into the genealogical classification of Aramaic languages. 0.1. Theoretical Preliminaries on DOM

The inquiry will not make a lot of sense should we not wonder why a language may ever need an analytical DOM. Those languages whose nouns possess the accusative case (= ACC) rarely develop an analytical ad-nominal DOM, and the complementary distribution of ACC and DOM is the traditional wisdom in Semitic philology. Thus Rebecca Hasselbach notes as a matter of course that the appearance of a DOM in Old West-ern Aramaic “indicates that at least nominative and accusative must have been indistinguishable morphologically (Hasselbach 2007:103, and see now Hasselbach 2013). We have found so far only one clear-cut counter-example in the world’s languages. According to a p. c. of Wolfgang Schulze, “in Old Armenian, the accusative plural was marked for the

M. Kalinin, S. Loesov, Encoding of the Direct Object … 3

morphological case (-s). The preposition z-1 was normally added to defi-nite nouns in DirObj function, e. g.

(1) NOM.PL osker-k ‘bones’ ACC.PL osker-s [–def.]

z-osker-s [+def.].”

Schulze describes the situation as follows: “The main function of the ‘nota accusativi’ z- in Old Armenian was to indicate definiteness/specificity/typ-icality. It does not seem to be restricted to animate, human nouns, as can be seen from the following example:

(2) yev sksav l3vanal z-ot-s ašakert-ac-n and he began to wash (l3vanal) z-foot-PL.ACC pupil-PL.GEN-DEF.3 ‘And he began to wash the feet of the disciples’ (John 13:5).”

According to a p. c. of Giorgio Iemmolo, who is working on a typologi-cal monograph “Differential Object Marking,” the situation in Old Arme-nian may be unique. He mentions Geez as another language which pos-sessed both prenominal DOM (la-) and the ACC case ending (-a) on the same token of DirObj, yet we believe that the examples that may have shown up in the sources are errors against good usage: DOM la- and the ACC case ending -a ought not to be compatible, because Geez considers la- to be syntactically a preposition (cf. I.3.0 below, an introduction to l- in Egyptian Aramaic), and genuine prepositions do not govern the ACC in Semitic. Cf. also Schneider 1959:3: “Le complément d’objet du verbe se met normalement à l’accusatif. Mais dans de nombreux cas cet accusatif est remplacé par une construction analytique: le verbe s’adjoint un pro-nom suffixe qui se rapporte au complément et celui-ci est introduit par la préposition la-.” Thus what is characteristic of Geez (and probably unique to it within Semitic) is that this language uses in the DirObj slot either the DirObj-indexing qatal-o la-n3guś (‘he killed-him to-the king’) construction or the accusative case, and their distribution depends on se-mantic/pragmatic features of the respective DirObj. (Note that the nomi-nal case in Geez is residual: -a accusative vs. -Ø non-accusative.) The situa-tion in Geez is special due to this distribution of a retention (a case ending) and an innovation (la-flagging coupled with DirObj-indexing on the verb). As we will see in the course of our inquiry, in Aramaic the DirObj-indexing (once more coupled with the use of an analytical DOM) appears as late as in

1 Lazard 2001:875 notes, “la valeur ancienne de z- en arménien classique était

sans doute ‘par rapport à’ ” (Meillet 1936:94), and this is a good source for a DOM.

4 Articles: Semitic Studies certain Middle varieties (e. g., Syriac and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic), while the Aramaic noun had lost its case endings already in pre-historic times.2 Thus the DOM usually appears due to a loss of synthetic ACC but does

not replace the latter as a syntactic marker. In comparison to the lost syn-thetic ACC, a younger analytical DOM has a more concrete and language-specific semantic load. The universals of DOM semantics are well-known. The key word will be salience of the flagged DirObj, routinely mani-fested as animacy and definiteness.3 As for Semitic, the oldest varieties of Akkadian and Arabic had the ac-

cusative case and no DOMs, while after the loss of the NOM–ACC case dis-tinction both groups of languages did develop DOMs.4 Little is known about the Akkadian DOM ana, whose primitive mean-

ing is ALLATIVE–DATIVE ‘to(wards), for.’ Cf. a literature review in Rubin 2005:105, to which add Luukko 2004:169, and see I.3.1.2.2 below. It is generally believed that the DOM ana served to oppose the Agent to the semantic Object, yet the reader will notice that our reference tools on Neo-Assyrian content themselves with reproducing the same set of three to five examples, without much detail or analysis. Hämeen-Anttila 2000: 77 notes: “When the parts of the sentence are not sufficiently indicated by word order and congruence, or when the object is particularly empha-sized, the preposition ana may be used as a nota accusativi.” Luukko 2004:

2 In our study, the DirObj-indexing is an umbrella notion for what descriptive

grammars call “resumptive pronouns” and “anticipatory pronouns.” See now a short essay by Eitan Grossman on double accusative marking in general and on the importance of distinguishing between DirObj flagging (= “marking”) and in-dexing: http://dlc.hypotheses.org/446.

3 Eitan Grossman comments on this text in a p. c.: “Salience is a pretty fuzzy no-tion. Again, according to Iemmolo, object markers tend to develop starting from topical objects. Topic is a more specific and better defined notion than salience.” The first and the third sentences of this comment are obviously correct. Yet it looks like what the present writers need at this stage of research is a fuzzy umbrella-con-cept, not a well-defined one. (And it comes to mind that salient DirObjs will often be topical.) Note that “animacy,” unlike both “salience” and “topicality” (and partly unlike “definiteness”) is a binary lexical-semantics feature of a hardware nature, i. e., it does not depend on syntax and pragmatics. To understand our Aramaic data, we have to start with something more flexible than “animacy.” To see what we mean the reader may want to have a look at exx. (42)–(43) and (45)–(46) in Section I.3.1.3.

4 On differential object marking in Tigrinya, see now Kievit 2009. On differ-ential object marking in other Semitic languages not mentioned in this paper, see the respective sections in Rubin 2005.


169 claims that “the use of /ana/ was not merely restricted to necessary con-texts, but was possibly (sic!—M. K., S. L.) spreading and becoming the gen-eral marker of the accusative in Neo-Assyrian.” This big claim is supported by no single example. Finally, it is often said that “this use of ana can un-doubtedly be attributed to Aramaic influence” (Rubin 2005:105), yet no piece of evidence in support of this idea has been ever produced. The Arabic picture is known in broad strokes; it has hardly ever been

seriously studied in terms of syntactic semantics. On li-/la- as a DOM in spoken Arabic varieties, see a survey in Rubin 2005:105ff. (with lit.). On fi-, cf. the following p. c. of Stephan Procházka: “A characteristic of most dialects of the Maghreb is that direct objects can be marked by the prepo-sition fi- (Procházka 1993:126f.), e. g. Tunis: µắll f-ǝ̆lfnîq ‘he opened the jewelry box (gingerly).’ To my knowledge, there are no in-depth studies of this syntactical phenomenon for Contemporary Tunisian Arabic. The two comprehensive grammars on Tunisian Arabic present relatively vague explanations: Singer 1984:624 maintains that fi- is used for imper-fective actions, while Cohen 1975:248 says: ‘Il [fi-] peut introduire le complément de certains verbes normalement transitifs. Dans ce cas, il apporte une nuance d’action habituelle, durable ou répétée.’ For Moroc-can Arabic see Harrell 1962:209. There is also evidence for fi- as a direct object marker in Palestine and Cairo.” The pristine repertory of nominal cases in Semitic is rudimentary.

Nouns in the singular have three cases: NOM encodes the subject, ACC en-codes DirObj, the rest of the syntactic participants are encoded by prepo-sitional phrases, and all prepositions govern their dependent nouns in GEN.5 (GEN codes all kinds of adnominal arguments as well.)6 Hence nom-inal DirObj in older Semitic varieties gets compulsory marking whatever the semantic relationship between the finite verb and the entity encoded by DirObj. In other words, in Semitic languages that preserve case end-ings, the syntax of the transitive clause is insensitive to its contents in so far as the choice of case goes. Consider the verb phrase ‘to cultivate a/the field,’ ubiquitous in Old Babylonian letters, eqlam šipram epēšuminf., e. g.

5 Personal pronouns of the most archaic Semitic varieties may keep traces of a

more ancient picture. Thus Old Babylonian personal pronouns have tonic (non-cliti-cized) DAT shapes, which are still sometimes used by themselves rather than governed by the semantically “dative” preposition ana (Huehnergard 1997:272f., 606).

6 I. e., if we disregard the noun phrases headed by an adjective which is de-fined by a substantive in the accusative, as in the case of the Arabic tamyīz/accusa-tive of specification: µasanun wag ̌h-an ‘pretty-facedACC’.

6 Articles: Semitic Studies (3) eql-am šipr-am ul īpuš field-ACC work-ACC NEG (ul) do-PRET3cs. ‘He has not done the work on the field/he has not plowed the field’ (see CAD Š3 77).

Epēšum ‘to do’ is a “light verb,” which means its contribution to the lexical semantics of the verb phrase is modest: the burden of the predi-cate’s lexical meaning is carried by the complement šiprum ‘work’ in ACC. Thus both the nominal part of the compound verb šipram-epēšum and the genuine semantic object eqlum ‘field’ indiscriminately receive the ACC marking. Semantic bleaching of ACC is plainly manifest in the “adverbial accusative” of the Semitic languages that still preserve their case endings: the “adverbial accusative” encodes various kinds of non-core participants (or “adjuncts”), e. g., those associated with a verb of intransitive motion.7 After the loss of case markers (say, due to phonetic erosion), the lan-

guage may undertake something to tell its subjects from its DirObjs. The thriftiest method is to keep a rigid word-order whatever the semantics of the verb and DirObj, the way it happens in English. Other languages (even those whose word-order is impenetrable to pragmatics) supply cer-tain types of DirObjs with a phonetically embodied DirObj marker. In other words, a cliticized DirObj marker is hardly ever a 100% functional replacement of the lost ACC, therefore its appearance opens a possibility for the form of the transitive clause to be fine-tuned to its semantics. Since the prototypical subject of a transitive clause is thematic (i. e.,

definite) and volitional (i. e., animate), it is definite animate DirObjs that most likely need a DOM in order to appear as formally distinct from the subjects (cf. Lazard 2001:879f., with lit., the now classical expression of this view being Comrie 1979). Peter Arkadiev and Eitan Grossman tell us that nowadays this “distinguishing arguments” theory does not hold sway in typological studies and that some people think it is topical DirObjs that require special marking more often that anything else. Eitan Gross-man informs us that sentences with definite animate Agents and equally definite animate Patients constitute around 3% or less in most corpora checked. Yet the “distinguishing arguments” approach squares well with part of our Aramaic data, so we will stick to it for the time being. As we observed above, definite animate DirObjs are but the best ex-

amples of a cognitively salient patient-like participant. Salience is a prag-matic rather than an ontological feature (cf., e. g. Givón 2001:373f.), so

7 See Fischer 1987:173 for examples from Classical Arabic.


so we expect the speaker to manipulate DOM (within certain boundaries) depending on what she wants to get across to the interlocutor. A good example is Standard Spanish with its veo a un niño classroom rule, accord-ing to which the DOM a is used to introduce each and every animate DirObj (i. e., the latter’s definiteness value is supposed to be irrelevant). Yet there are enough examples for animate DirObjs introduced without a, as well as those for inanimate DirObjs introduced by a. The use of the DOM a in Spanish has received lots of scholarly attention. Bernard Pot-tier showed back in 1968 (Pottier 1968) that the use of the DOM a may depend on the semantic properties of the verb (i. e., on what we now call the degree of its semantic transitivity), on the way the situation affects the subject and DirObj, and on the “singularisation dans l’intention” of the DirObj, i. e., on its pragmatic salience. Consider an example:

(4) Porque yo perdí a mi madre el año pasado y ese dolor todavía lo tengo igual, me pregunto como será si en el fu-turo perdiera un hijo lo soportaría?8

The question received several answers. They show that the asker’s ut-terance is acceptable for other users of the question-and-answer site, since they employ similar turns of phrase in their comments. The an-swerers seem to understand “un hijo” as non-referential. Now consider a contrasting pair of examples with an inanimate DirObj

(and inanimate subjects which are synonyms in the two sentences):

(5) a. En 2005 el huracán Stan atacó la región del Lago de Ati-tlán y los efectos fueron enormes. Muchas vidas y hoga-res fueron destruidos.9

b. Hoy domingo 17 de abril a las 14 en Av. de Mayo y Bolí-var se realizará un festival solidario por el pueblo japo-nés, víctima de terremoto y tsunami que atacó a la región el pasado 11 de marzo.10

Both kinds of usage are frequent in regional varieties of Standard Spanish, so we may to surmise that in this particular case the choice lies with the speaker and is pragmatically conditioned. “The speaker’s choice” is the catchword of this Introduction. If we

stay with Spanish, in certain cases it leaves the speaker no choice at all.

8 http://es.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100125144502AAnbXTv. 9 http://weguatemala.org/es/ong/mayan-families?page=5. 10 http://agendagratisenbuenosaires.blogspot.ru/2011_04_01_archive.html.

8 Articles: Semitic Studies Thus ‘I saw Maksim’ may be translated into Standard Castilian only as ‘Vi a Maksim,’ ‘Le vi a Maksim,’ or ‘A Maksim le vi,’ etc.; i. e., in this case the DOM a may not be omitted (Nueva gramática 2009:2631, § 34.8e). This is ontology as yesterday’s pragmatics, to paraphrase Givón’s dictum today’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax. (The emergence of this hard-and-fast rule in Spanish is easily explainable by semantic and pragmatic properties of referential personal names.) Yet in other cases the speaker of Spanish has the discretion to use or omit the DOM a, she is able to manipulate it to her own satisfaction (see, e. g., Nueva gramática 2009:2630–2637 and von Heusinger–Kaiser 2007, with lit.). As we will see, this pragmatic rather than purely ontological/hardware

approach helps explain the use of various DOMs across the history of Aramaic. Part I: Western Aramaic

In the sections that follow we will discuss the encoding of DirObj in the below corpora and languages: 1. Eighth-Century Inscriptions in Old Western Aramaic11 2. Mesopotamian Aramaic of the Neo-Assyrian period 3. Egyptian Aramaic of the Achaemenid period 4. Biblical Aramaic 5. Nabataean Aramaic 6. Palmyrene Aramaic 7. Dead Sea Scrolls Aramaic 8. Targum Onqelos-Jonathan Aramaic 9. Jewish Palestinian Aramaic 10. Samaritan Aramaic 11. Christian Palestinian Aramaic 12. Modern Western Aramaic

Mini-Review of Literature

Our study is meant to be a part of a future “History of Aramaic.” We dis-cuss the synchronic DirObj encoding in each of the above corpora in some philological detail, while our ultimate concern is to understand the

11 An earlier version of this section was published in “The Classification of Se-

mitic Languages: Archaism and Innovation. Proceedings of the V Meeting on Comparative Semitics, Córdoba, 06/6-8/2012,” ed. by Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala and Wilfred G. E. Watson (pp. 45–57).


evolution of Aramaic. In this respect, the inquiry does not have exact predecessors. What comes nearest in terms of scope and subject-matter is Rubin 2005:94–105. Aaron Rubin describes in general features the nomi-nal (and partly pronominal) DirObj encoding in the whole of pre-mod-ern Aramaic, as well as DirObj markers in other Semitic languages. The piece is a part of the author’s monograph on “grammaticalization in Se-mitic.” The aim of Rubin’s book is to impart the concept of grammaticali-zation to students of Semitic and to show general linguistic readership that Semitic languages display instances of grammaticalization, in particu-lar of the kinds that are familiar cross-linguistically. Other works which deal with DirObj marking in various Semitic lan-

guages including Aramaic are Geoffrey Khan’s “Object Markers and Agree-ment Pronouns in Semitic Languages” (Khan 1984) and Holger Gzella’s “Differentielle Objektmarkierung im Nordwestsemitischen als Konvergenz-erscheinung” (Gzella 2013). Rebecca Hasselbach touches upon the subject in her monograph “Case in Semitic: Roles, Relations, and Reconstruction” (Hasselbach 2013). Of these three, Geoffrey Khan’s contribution is the most informative and rich in detail. As for DirObj encoding in individual Western Aramaic varieties, be-

sides reference grammars there exist a number of in-depth studies. Mu-raoka 1992 and Folmer 1995:340–371 are detailed inquiries into the ways DirObj is expressed in Qumran and Achaemenid Aramaic, respec-tively. Both of them have been indispensable in the course of our re-search, as the reader will see in the corresponding sections. Folmer 2008 is a study of DOM in what she calls “Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Inscrip-tions.” On pp. 132ff. of this contribution Folmer offers an insightful lit-erature review, to which we refer the reader for additional bibliographic data. Florentin 1991 is a study of bound object pronouns in Samaritan Aramaic. 1. Eighth-Century Inscriptions in Old Western Aramaic12

1.1. DirObj is a noun

The only pre-nominal DOM used in the corpus is !yt. In the corpus, !yt appears twice as a host for pronominal DirObjs (I.1.2), while pre-nominal

12 We do not include here the Tell Fexeriye inscription (KAI 309), since accord-

ing to scholarly consensus it represents a different variety of Aramaic. In our view, TF is the first now available textual testimony of Old Eastern Aramaic (Loesov 2012). We will look at the DirObj encoding of this text later in our study.

10 Articles: Semitic Studies !yt is attested at least eleven times. It appears in the two extant Northwest Syrian documents of any appreciable length, KAI 202 (ZKR) and 222–224 (Sefire), and in a peripheral inscription (KAI 320, Bukan).13 It is missing from the contemporaneous peripheral inscriptions written in Old Western Aramaic and found in Zincirli (KAI 216–218).14 Consider all eleven extant examples:

ZKR (1) w-hwsp[t …] !yt kl mµgt […]

‘And I added <to a previously mentioned city> a whole cir-cle of […]’ (KAI 202 B 4f.).15

(2–3) w-bnyt !yt […] !yt !pš

‘I (re)built [a GN and] Afis’ (KAI 202 B 10f.).

(4–5) w-k[tbt b]h !yt !šr ydy [w-kl m]n yhg" !yt !š[r ydy] Zkr mlk Ñm[t]

‘And [I wrote on] it the story of my achievements.16 [Now, whoever] destroys17 the story [of achievements] of ZKR king of Hamath …’ (KAI 202 B 14–17).

(6) […] !š! w-!yt […..] š[r]šh

‘[Execute?] the man and […] his folk’ (KAI 202 B 27f.).

Sefire (7) l-t!th b-µylk w-![tm l-t!]twn b-µylkm l-šgb b[y]ty [w-hn "q]r[k l-]y!th l-

šgb !yt "qr[y]

‘<If> yousg. do not come with your army and [you do not] comepl. with your armies to strengthen my house, [and if your offspring does not] come to strengthen (!yt) [my] off-spring’ (KAI 222 B 31ff.).

(8–9) !hbd !yt ktk w-!yt mlkh

13 We do not take into account assumed tokens of !yt restored in partly broken

portions of texts, e. g., KAI 310:4, 10 (Tell Dan). 14 The Zincirli vernacular was not Aramaic (cf. KAI 214–215), while the site of

KAI 320 was at the time not a Semitic-speaking area at all. 15 The translation follows Gibson 1975:11. The exact meaning of mµgt is un-

known, cf. DNWSI 611, with ref. to previous literature. 16 The translation follows Gibson ibid. The exact meaning of !šr is unknown,

cf. DNWSI 128 (!šr5), with ref. to previous literature. 17 DNWSI 715.


‘I shall destroy (the words) “KTK” and “its king” (written on the stele)’ (KAI 223 C 5f.).18

(10) […] kl !lh[y "d]y! zy b-spr! [zn]h !yt mt"!l w-brh w-br brh w-"qrh w-kl mlky !rpd w-kl rbwh w-"mhm

‘May all the gods of the treaty who are mentioned in this in-scription [do something bad to] Matiel and to his son and grandson, and his offspring, and to all the kings of Arpad and all its nobles, and to their kinsmen’ (KAI 223 C 12–16).19

Bukan

(11) zy yhns !yt n´b[!] ˹znh˺ […] ‘Whoever will upset20 this stele’ (KAI 320:1′).21

The current view of what the prenominal !yt is doing in the corpus is epitomized in Rubin 2005:94 (with lit.): “The nota accusativi !yt optionally appears before definite direct objects. <…> For nominal objects there are many examples with no direct object marker” (boldface added). For the sake of completeness, we will adduce here scholarly opinions not referred to in Rubin 2005. Garr 1985:192 believes that in ZKR and Sefire !yt “marked direct objects that were of particular interest to the author,” which may make a kind of sense, but, given the nature of the corpus, is tanta-mount to the notion of !yt being ‘optional.’ Folmer 1995:365 observes that !yt ‘is found irregularly’ before various semantic kinds of DirObjs, which she enumerates. Here is an observation that helps solve the riddle:

!yt does introduce only definite nominal DirObjs, yet it shows up solely where a definite DirObj noun phrase cannot take the definite article (= DefArt), i. e., where DefArt can be joined to neither the noun phrase head nor to its dependent noun (if the head is “in the construct,” i. e., modified by another noun).

18 See KAI II:263 for this sagacious interpretation. The literal understanding

is excluded in the context of stereotyped curses to those who would dare meddle with the stele.

19 The words ‘[do something bad]’ in the translation stand for a broken verb preceding the extant text (line 12); the verb is a predicate of the cited sentence.

20 On the interpretation of the verb form yhns, see Sokoloff 1999:108, with lit. 21 Add this token of !yt to those adduced in Degen 1969:64. Delete the Tell

Dan example from Rubin 2005:94, fn. 15 as nonexistent and replace it with KAI 320:1′, overlooked in Rubin 2005.

12 Articles: Semitic Studies Speculatively, in Old Western Aramaic, this blocking of DefArt within

a definite noun phase can happen only in the following three cases (the situation is roughly the same as in Biblical Hebrew and Classical Arabic): (1) the noun phrase is a proper noun and therefore is not compatible

with DefArt (and add here other possible/imaginable types of substantives incompatible with DefArt because of their lexical semantics); (2) the noun phrase is a noun whose dependent is a bound possessive

pronoun, which is as a matter of fact incompatible with DefArt; (3) the DirObj noun phrase has a dependent substantive that cannot take

DefArt because it is either a proper noun or has a bound possessive pronoun. Let us now take a glance at the above sentences with definite DirObjs

introduced by !yt: DefArt does not appear because the noun phrases in question are proper nouns (exx. 3, 8, 10, and probably 2), or have a pos-sessive pronoun blocking DefArt on the head (exx. 7 and 9) or on the de-pendent (ex. 4) of a noun phrase. In ex. 5, the modifier is ‘ZKR king of Hamath,’ so it cannot take DefArt. This makes up eight out of the ten available tokens of !yt introducing nominal DirObjs (excluding No. 11 from the count). Our exx. 1 and 6 have to remain non liquet, because what fol-lows is heavily damaged. Thus, in definite DirObj noun phrases, !yt and DefArt stand in com-

plementary distribution. The only exception is (11), a peripheral inscrip-tion from Bukan (provided the restoration of the partially broken line is correct). As we will learn presently, this is for a reason. Anticipating an attempt to understand this non-trivial distribution, we

will now pass in review the whole of the evidence for DefArt within DirObj noun phrases in the corpus. Since demonstratives forming part of a noun phrase routinely co-occur with DefArt,22 we will first consider all six tokens of demonstrative pronouns within “arthrous” DirObj noun phrases:

(12) [w-]šmt qdm [!lwr] n´b! znh

‘[And] I have set up this stele before [DN]’ (KAI 202 B 13f., ZKR).

(13) w-m[n y]hg" n´b! znh

‘And whoever destroys this stele’ (KAI 202 B 18f., ZKR).

(14) !nh bnyt byt! znh

‘I have built this palace’ (KAI 216:20, Zincirli).

22 See the dictionaries and concordances, and cf. Lambdin 1971 on DefArt in Sefire

mostly appearing on the nouns that are heads of demonstratives or relative clauses.


(15) w-!l tštq µdh mn mly spr! zn[h]

‘And do not neglect23 any one of the words of this text’ (KAI 222 B 8f., Sefire).24

(16) [… tš

?]lmn "dy! !ln

‘[if you carry out] this treaty’ (KAI 222 B 24, Sefire).

(17) w-mn l-y´r mly spr! zy b-n´b! znh

‘But whoever does not observe the words of the inscription which (are) on this stele’ (KAI 222 C 16f.).

(18) yhpkw !lhn !š[! h]!

‘May gods overturn this man’ (KAI 222 C 21f.).

(19) ld [sp]ry! !ln

‘Efface these inscriptions’ (KAI 223 C 9, Sefire).

Now there follow the rest of DirObj noun phrases that have DefArt, all of them from Sefire:25

(20) !hpk ¢bt!

‘I shall change the good things’ (KAI 222 C 19).

(21) !h!bd spr[ y]!

‘I shall destroy the inscriptions’ (KAI 223 C 4).

(22) w-yzµl h! mn ld spr[ y]! mn bty !lhy!

23 The interpretation is disputed, see DNWSI 1200. ‘Do not neglect’ presup-

poses the D-stem of štq, while the G-stem reading ‘Let no one of the words of this inscription be silent’ cannot be ruled out.

24 Spr! znh ‘this text’ is not a DirObj but a part of a composite DirObj noun phrase ‘any one of the words of this text.’ We decided to include it anyway.

25 Exx. 20–23 go against the suggestion of Thomas O. Lambdin, “at its origin the emphatic state was 100 per cent predictable by construction” (Lambdin 1971: 319), i. e., at an early stage of Aramaic, DefArt is supposed to have been semanti-cally redundant, because the respective noun phrases always had lexical or syn-tactic markers of definiteness (= demonstratives or relative clauses). On Lamb-din’s hypothesis, our exx. 20–23 would be among the alleged ten exceptional to-kens of DefArt “on an otherwise unqualified noun” (ibid. 318), whose list Lambdin did not care to provide (Lambdin’s corpus is Sefire alone). In any event, the hy-pothesis would be worth considering only had Lambdin come up with examples of “absolute” nouns which are pragmatically/semantically definite, but this did not happen.

14 Articles: Semitic Studies

‘Then let this one beware of effacing the inscriptions away from “gods’ houses” ’ (KAI 223 C 6f.).26

(23) kl gbr zy … ymll mln lµyt l"ly […] tqµ mly! mn ydh

‘Whoever … will speak bad words against me [… and] you shall/will take the (aforementioned) words from his hand (= from him)’ (KAI 224:1f.).27

Against the background of standard Biblical Hebrew (= BH) prose, one expects that in definite DirObj noun phrases DOM and DefArt com-bine freely, but as we have seen this does not happen in Old Western Aramaic. By the same token, our acquaintance with standard BH prose leads us to expect that in definite DirObj noun phrases that include a demonstrative adjective (‘this,’ ‘these,’ etc.) all three markers of definite-ness combine freely (Ex 4:17, Ez 12:23 among hundreds of examples), while actually this BH kind of usage is attested nowhere except in (11), within the text which is otherwise different from the “core” corpus in terms of its use of DefArt.28 Now then, the above OBSERVATION leads to the following RULE:

DOM !yt is prefixed to those referential DirObj noun phrases that cannot take DefArt as a morphosyntactic signal of their definiteness.29

26 ld spr[y]! may as well be a noun phrase. 27 See various interpretations of the passage in KAI II 264–267 and Fitzmyer

1995:137, 143f. Exegetical differences fortunately do not bear on our grammati-cal point, so we have opted for a non-committal word-for-word rendering.

28 E. g., cf. the following (formally) definite-descriptions (i. e., noun phrases sup-plied with DefArt) from KAI 320 (Bukan): [k]l mh mwtn! ‘whatever plague’ (l. 2); [k]zy hwh b-kl !rq! ‘as much as there is on the whole of the earth’ (l. 3). In the core Old Western Aramaic of Sefire, almost literally identical noun phrases show up in the very same context of stereotyped maledictions as in Bukan, and they are anarthrous: [ysk h]dd klmh lµyh b-!rq w-b-šmyn w-klmh "ml ‘May Hadad pour over it whatever evil (there is) on earth and in heaven and whatever trouble’ (KAI 222:25f.). Note that André Lemaire, in his rejoinder to Sokoloff 1999, had al-ready observed that “l’état emphatique irrégulier dans KL.MH.MWTN! <…> peut faire douter que l’auteur de cette inscription ait été ‘a native Aramaean scribe’ (p. 106)” (Lemaire 1999:58). On the whole, against the general background of Old Aramaic, the evidence of Bukan looks like a wrong usage of definite descriptions by a writer for whom Aramaic was a second language.

29 Referring expressions are those noun phrases that point to an individual ref-erent, ideally though not necessarily within sight of the speaker. A large class of re-


This rule explains two pieces of evidence: 1) The DOM !yt is incompatible with DefArt (see the above observation). 2) In all clear cases30 from the above list (i. e., in our exx. 3–5, 8–10), the

DOM !yt is used either (1) with proper nouns or (2) with common nouns [+possess.].31 In the corpus, DirObj noun phrases headed by proper nouns always prefix the DOM !yt, while DirObj noun phrases [+possess.] behave one way or the other depending on their referentiality value. To show the validity of the rule, we will take a closer look at the above

sentences with DirObj noun phrases introduced by !yt. The reader will be able to ascertain for herself if these noun phrases are referential. Note that the DOM !yt is not an “obstinate” (or a “far-reaching”) marker, in order to maintain its force it has to be prefixed immediately to each rele-vant noun phrase, cf. in particular (2–3) w-bnyt !yt […] !yt !pš and (8–9) !hbd !yt ktk w-!yt mlkh.32 This granted, our rule is able to explain the word-ing of (10) above:

kl !lh[y "d]y! zy b-spr! [zn]h !yt mt"!l w-brh w-br brh w-"qrh w-kl mlky !rpd w-kl rbwh w-"mhm

‘May all the gods of the treaty who are mentioned in this in-scription [do something bad to] Matiel and to his son and grandson, and his offspring, and to all the kings of Arpad and all its nobles, and to their folks.’

In this sentence, Matiel (mt"!l) the king of Arpad is referential (as any personal name referring to a particular individual), the rest of the DirObj noun phrases [+possess.] are not. (Matiel was the party contracting with Bir-Ga!ya, the ruler of a city-state ‘KTK.’) As for Matiel’s “son and grand- ferring expressions consists of definite noun phrases with common nouns as heads (‘bring me that cup of tea,’ ‘my mother is waiting outside’). Another class of refer-ring expressions is formed by noun phrases with proper nouns that in a given con-text pick an unambiguously identifiable individual referent (‘Barack Obama is the incumbent president’). For the purposes of this study, referring expressions are a subtype of definite noun phrases. Other kinds of definite noun phrases relevant for our inquiry are generics (‘Jesus destroyed the sin not the sinner,’ ‘perhaps I am a little like the grown-ups’) and anaphoric noun phrases, i. e., the ones referring back to the entities previously mentioned by the speaker. The most recent comprehen-sive treatments of definiteness and reference are Lyons 1999 and Kibrik 2011.

30 I. e., in the passages which are reasonably intact and philologically transpar-ent. Our ex. (7) is grammatically difficult, it will be discussed presently.

31 I. e., common nouns which are heads of bound possessive pronouns. 32 In this respect, !yt behaves roughly like the article in English and unlike

English prepositions.

16 Articles: Semitic Studies son, and his offspring, and all the kings of Arpad and all its nobles, and their folks,” the noun phrases in question do not point to individual ref-erents because they belong to the stock of stereotyped curses familiar in the Ancient Near Eastern monumental inscriptions since the 3rd millen-nium B. C. As we have already mentioned, all DirObj noun phrases headed by

proper nouns have !yt prefixed, in compliance with the above RULE. This is because proper nouns in Old Western Aramaic (as in so many other languages) do not take DefArt and therefore, whenever they show up as referring DirObj noun phrases, they must prefix the DOM !yt as a mor-phosyntactic signal of their referentiality. Example (7) <if you do not come> l-šgb byty … l-šgb !yt "qr[ y] ‘to

strengthen (Ø) my house … to strengthen (!yt) [my] offspring’ looks like the only token that departs from the RULE, yet we will now see that it is the rule that helps solve the philological riddle of the text. Byty and "qry are near-synonymous, and both seem to be non-referential (this is once more due to the genre of this monumental inscription), so we do not ex-pect DOM to be used with either of them. Degen 1969:69 tentatively ex-plains l-šgb byty as nominal rection of the infinitive. What then can be done about ‘l-šgb byty’ but ‘l-šgb !yt "qry,’ i. e., allegedly-nominal and verbal rection in parallelism? The orthography of Old Western Aramaic does not allow one to judge how the assumed G-stem infinitives33 interact with their semantic objects (i. e., whether the dependence structure is nominal or verbal) unless the infinitives in question take !yt. Note that in the cor-pus, philologically transparent infinitives of derived stems are always heads of noun phrases vis-à-vis their semantic objects. Consider an example:

(24) yb"h r!šy l-hmtty w-l-hmtt bry w-"qry

‘<if an enemy of mine> seeks my head to kill me or to kill my son and my offspring’ (KAI 224:11).

33 In the Old Western Aramaic corpus, there are no *maqtal G-infinitives,

which latter are productive (probably the only ones in use) in the variety repres-ented by Tell Fexeriye. The cumulative evidence makes it plausible that Old Western Aramaic still preserved the PS G-infinitive *qatāl-. As the reader will see presently, we believe this G-infinitive governed its semantic object “in the accusa-tive,” unlike the innovative infinitives of the derived stems in Old Western Ara-maic, which have a nominal -t suffix and are morphosyntactic nouns.


Both C-stem infinitive tokens display nominal government, to the extent that the second of them has two coordinated noun phrases as depend-ents. For additional examples, see Degen 1969. A simple way to solve the philological riddle of ‘l-šgb byty’ vs. ‘l-šgb !yt

"qry’ is to come to terms with the facts of life, i. e., the verbal government in both syntagms, and to ask if ‘l-šgb byty’ omits !yt for a pragmatic reason. Note that l-šgb byty may form an isogloss with a passage from Zincirli !µzt byt !by ‘I have taken over my father’s house’ (KAI 216:11f.). Should one consider byt !by a referring expression, it will be the only definite DirObj noun phrase in Zincirli Aramaic (KAI 216–218) in which the DOM !yt is missing in defiance of our description, otherwise KAI 216–218 happens to have no slot for !yt. (I. e., in terms of our study, Bar-Rakib, unlike Bu-kan, may be not different from Sefire and ZKR, and cf. ex. 14 above.) We suggest that byt in both passages (unlike in ex. 14) may have pointed to an abstract concept, in the way of patria potestas, while "qry ‘my progeny’ is reified and singularized, so the difference between l-šgb byty … l-šgb !yt "qry reflects nuances in the writer’s thinking. In terms of our Introduction (I.0.1), for the writer ‘my progeny’ will be salient the way ‘my father’s house’ is not.34 We claim that a bound possessive pronoun is not a strong enough sig-

nal of referentiality in Old Western Aramaic (i. e., unlike DefArt, which is sufficient as such a signal). Therefore !yt has to appear before referential DirObj noun phrases that include a bound possessive pronoun as their rightmost element, see exx. (4) and (9) above. As it turns out, the rest of [+possess.] DirObj noun phrases in the corpus are non-referential. Con-sider the evidence:

(25) !šlµ ml!ky ![l]wh <…> !w yšlµ ml!kh !ly

‘<If> I send a messenger of mine to him <…> or he sends a messenger of his to me <the freedom of movement should be secured>’ (KAI 224:8).

The sentence is part of the treaty’s stipulations, the situation is hypothetical.

(26) yhpkw !lhn !š[! h]! w-byth w-kl zy [b]h w-yšmw tµtyth [l-"]lyth

34 We have to mention KAI 222 A 13 pqµw "ynykm l-µzyh "dy brg!yh ‘Open (pl.)

your eyes to see the treaty of PN.’ We do not know what to make of the sentence, since µzyh is not an admissible orthography for the G-stem infinitive of a IIIy verb. For detailed discussions of grammatical problems related to this passage, see Degen 1969:77f. and the commentaries.


‘May gods overturn this man (= the prospective culprit) and his house and whatever there is in it, and may they turn it upside down’ (lit. ‘make its lower part into its upper part’) (KAI 222 C 21, 21–24).

All three noun phrases with possessive pronouns of (26) stand in the sanction/curse part of the treaty. Their definiteness value is anaphoric, i. e., it depends on the antecedent noun phrase !š[! h]!, whose meaning in the larger context has to be something like ‘this man,’ whatever the resto-ration of the broken letters. Since at this turn of the treaty text “this man” does not refer to a specific (or “individuated”) human being, the three [+possess.] DirObj noun phrases that point back to “this man” are not referential either; for this reason they do not take !yt. See also a couple more DirObj noun phrases in the hypothetical-fu-

ture-oriented clauses of the treaty text:

(27) qtl !µk ‘kill your brother’ (KAI 224:18);

qtlw mr!km ‘kill (pl.) your lord’ (KAI 224:21f.).

It follows from the contents and structure of the inscription that these noun phrases are non-referential, therefore !yt is not called for.35 Note that !yt is never used in composites with “light verbs” which in-

clude a DirObj noun phrase [+possess.] with weakened lexical meaning (‘he sent his hand’ type). As mentioned in the Introduction, “light verbs” are verbs with reducible semantic contents (in English, to give, to make, to take, etc.) which form compounds with noun phrases that are formally their direct objects (‘to give a hug,’ ‘to make a mistake’). Formation of such com-pounds can sometimes be viewed as deverbal derivation. Cf., e. g., w-!š! ydy ‘and I lifted up my hands (to DN)’ = ‘I prayed’ (KAI 202 A 11); pqµw "ynykm ‘open your eyes’ = ‘look carefully’ (KAI 222 A 13); yšlµ ydh ‘(if) he sends his hand (to take my land)’ (KAI 222 B 27);36 hn l-thb lµmy ‘if you do not give my bread’ = ‘if you do not feed me’ (KAI 222 B 38), and more.

35 The same is true of nominal DirObjs in our ex. (30) nkh tkh !y<t>h w-"qrh w-

šrbwh w-mwddwh b-µrb ‘You shall strike him, his family, the members of his clan and his relatives with the sword’ (KAI 224:13f.). It will be discussed in I.1.2.

36 According to the lists created for us by the Bible Works search engine, the šlµ yd-suff. verb phrase appears in BH thirty three times without !ät, while in fifteen cases it is supplied with this DOM. No obvious distribution rule is to be seen. Allowing for het-erogeneity of our BH corpus and insurmountable dating problems, one has a reason to speculate that in the Hebrew varieties spoken by the time our Old Western Ara-maic evidence had been committed to writing, this DOM was entrenched much


Finally, anarthrous DirObj noun phrases are all pragmatically indefi-nite in the corpus. Consider an example:

(28) w-hrmw šr mn šr µzrk w-h"mqw µr´ mn µr[´h]

‘and they put up a rampart higher than the wall of Hadrak, and dug a trench deeper than its moat’ (KAI 202 A 10).37

To sum up: the Old Western Aramaic corpus consists of a few monu-mental inscriptions which share much in terms of contents, style and genre/structure. This kind of linguistic evidence is not favourable for most descriptive purposes, especially given the meagre size of the extant texts. Yet we have found a non-trivial and consistent pattern of encoding the nominal DirObj across the corpus whose parts were written down by differ-ent eighth-century writers. This fact enhances the chance that this pattern reflects a genuine vernacular usage. The validity of our results is marred by the fact we do not know how to say in Old Western Aramaic ‘his young daughter’ or simply ‘the young daughter,’ since the corpus has no single example of an attributive adjective dependent on a “definite” substantive. An Interim Note: Farewell to Pre-Nominal *!iyāt in Aramaic

Now the reader will ask why the accusative marker !yt of Old Western Ar-amaic is so special. Why, unlike in BH prose, can it not be prefixed to ar-throus substantives? In other words, why is it that in the context of !yt redundancy in encoding definiteness of DirObj is avoided? This “why” is an historical question that leads us to the early (in particular, pre-Ara-maic) life of *!iyāt.38 Our answer is as follows: at the beginning of its career

deeper than in Aramaic. Yet even in Hebrew, compounds of ‘he sent his hand’ type were more resistant to !ät than most other kinds of “formally definite” DirObjs.

37 An exhaustive list of this kind of DirObj noun phrases is as follows: KAI 202 A 9f., 15; B 9; 222 A 22ff., 36; B 36f.; 223 A 2; 224:2. Sure enough, we target only the DirObj noun phrases that morphosyntactically could have been arthrous as well, i. e., they could have taken DefArt in the same syntactic slot if need be.

38 This is the original shape of the particle suggested in Kogan forthcoming, chapter 2. Leonid Kogan believes, building on part of the previous scholarship, that *!iyāt is etymologically related to “the element *-āt(i) in the oblique forms of the personal pronouns in Akkadian (šu!āti ‘him’) and certain WS languages.” We accept this etymology, in particular because it squares marvelously with the re-sults we have arrived at in this section. The etymological source of *!iyāt is now the PS base of tonic accusative pronouns (cf. OB šu!āti ‘him,’ yâti ‘me,’ etc.), and this finding helps us understand how the Old Western Aramaic !yt combines its demonstrative force with the restrictedness to the DirObj slot.

20 Articles: Semitic Studies (most importantly, in Proto-Aramaic), !yt used to do to respective DirObj noun phrases something other than announcing their “general” definite status (i. e., it behaved quite unlike the !ät of BH textbooks). As we already know, in the Old Western Aramaic corpus DefArt alone serves this end well enough. This is proven by exx. 20–23, which contain DirObj-noun-phrases the language interprets as definite. In Old Western Aramaic, within DirObj noun phrases, DefArt alone is able to take care of anaphoric definiteness (ex. 23), of generics (ex. 20), and of referring noun phrases (exx. 21, 22).39 The cumulative evidence allows one to suggest that at an earliest (prehis-toric) stage of Aramaic !yt was not a genuine grammatical “marker” (a species of DOM or nota objecti) but rather a deictic (probably presentative) particle which had been restricted to the pre-DirObj slot for etymological reasons (see fn. 38), since diachronically it is an erstwhile accusative pronoun. In terms of its contribution to the overall sense of noun phrases, !yt is compara-ble more to demonstratives than to DefArt. Finally, this non-trivial meaning of !yt shows through in the fact that it

violates a long-established universal of DirObj marking. Its recent formu-lation belongs to Haspelmath 2008:2 (with ref. to Silverstein 1976, and cf. Bossong 1983–1984:9):

If any Patient is overtly case-marked, then all Patients that are higher on the animacy scale, the definiteness scale, or the person scale are marked at least to the same extent.40

As we have just seen, !yt can be preposed to definite DirObjs that are not personal (exx. 2–5, 8, and probably 1), and it can be lacking before definite personal DirObjs (ex. 18, “this man,” a case of anaphoric defi-niteness). By contrast, this implicational universal works impeccably for the prenominal DOM l-, as we will see in the sections that follow. The lexically “special” (as we believe, demonstrative/presentative) nature

of the early !yt is corroborated by its fate in the historical Aramaic, which we will trace in the course of the study: in the corpora faithful to a vernacular usage, reflexes of *!iyāt had never become productive in the pre-nominal slot, i. e., they were never regularly employed as signals of a kind of nominal

39 It stands to reason that demonstratives are used as explicit anaphoric or os-

tensive expressions, in addition to DefArt, whenever the speaker needs them. I. e., demonstratives are compulsory escorted by DefArt, as e. g. in BH prose or Arabic but unlike in English or Spanish.

40 “An overtly marked Patient” stands here for any DirObj that has a DOM.—M. K., S. L.


DirObj noun phrases, unlike its sister !ät in the BH prose. As we will learn from the rest of this study, !yt as a marker of the nominal DirObj had lived through the heyday of its glory in Old Western Aramaic. What followed was a rapid decline. First, Proto-Aramaic *!iyāt had not become a part of the Proto-Eastern Aramaic (Loesov 2012, Loesov 2013). Second, in the whole of post-700 B. C. Aramaic the regular markers of the nominal DirObj are ei-ther Ø- or l-, yt in this slot being marginal and demonstrably artificial. 1.2. DirObj is a pronoun

In the corpus, the pronominal DirObj is encoded some twenty times by bound forms (see the list in Degen 1969:79ff.). There is nothing particular about the tokens bound on the Preterit

(Degen 1969:79f.). As for the Prefixing Conjugation (= PC), Degen 1969: 80 observes: “Auffällig ist aber, daß bei dem Suffix der 3. sg. mask. zwi-schen Verbform und Suffix ein -n- eingeschoben wird, wenn es an ein Langimpf. angefügt wird.” Consider all four tokens of what we will call in the rest of the study “nun-full forms,” as they are attested in the corpus:

(29) w-yhnsnh ‘(whoever removes this stele) and drugs it away’ (KAI 202 B 20, ZKR);

w-yqtl˹nh˺ ‘and (if ) he kills him’ (KAI 222 B 27);

y"brnh ‘(if ) he banishes him’ (KAI 224:17);

l-!š yhwnnh ‘nobody will oppresses him’41 (KAI 223 B 16).

Thus nun-full forms appear in both ZKR and Sefire, and the evidence (see the whole of it cited in Degen 1969:79ff.) does make one believe that the 3ms. “Langimperfekt” had to link the 3ms. object pronoun via -n-. Otherwise -n- did not show up in PC forms hosting object pronouns.

Speculatively, this could mean one of the three things: 1) all these forms were nun-less; 2) -n- was assimilated to the first consonant of the bound pronoun; 3) -n- was either assimilated or absent, depending on the kind of pronoun.42 With the sort of evidence we have in the corpus, it is not pos-sible to enter upon a discussion of the related (and well-known though unresolved) issues. Synchronically speaking, we cannot even be sure (pace Degen 1969:80) that the presuffixal nun was incompatible with the Jus-

41 √ yny, the C-stem. 42 Note that the 3mpl. object pronoun -hm was hosted on PC without an inter-

vening -n-, Degen 1969:80. Yet unfortunately the 3ms. form of PC + -hm is not attested.

22 Articles: Semitic Studies sive (= “short PC”), because there are no Jussive examples contrasting with the only nun-full tokens we have, i. e., with the four semantically non-directive (or “non-volitive”) forms of PC 3ms. + 3ms. object pro-nouns. We will get back to the present evidence later, when we deal with the presuffixal nun of Western Aramaic in the sections that follow. As we already know, !yt as a host for pronominal DirObj appears twice

in the corpus (both times in Sefire), if we accept an emendation (i. e., a scribal omission) and a restoration, both decisions being reliable. The preposition l- is not used this way in the extant Old Western Aramaic. Consider the examples:

(30) nkh tkh !y<t>h w-"qrh w-šrbwh w-mwddwh b-µrb

‘You shall strike him (= a hypothetical wrongdoer), his fam-ily, the members of his clan and his relatives with the sword’ (KAI 224:13f.; the reading is as in Fitzmyer 1995:138).

In the passage, !yt as the host for a suffixed object pronoun shows up to introduce a pronominal DirObj followed by three non-referential DirObj noun phrases. So !yt was used as an emergency measure, in order to avoid multiple copy-pasting of the whole verb phrase, ‘you shall strike him, you shall strike his family …’ etc. Since !yth looks syntactically and prosodially like a noun, it easily yields to coordination (~ “homogenization”) with nominal DirObjs. (31) w-hn mn µd !µy !w mn µd byt !by !w mn µd bny !w mn µd ngry !w mn

µd [p]qdy !w mn µd "my! zy b-ydy !w mn µd šn!y w-yb"h r!šy l-hmtty w-l-hmtt bry w-"qry hn !y[t]y yqtln !t t!th w-tqm dmy mn yd šn!y

‘If any one of my brothers or any one of my father’s house-hold or any one of my sons or any one of my officers or any one of my officials or any one of the people under my con-trol or any one of my enemies seeks my head to murder me and to murder my son and my offspring,—if me they kill, you shall come and avenge my blood from the hand of my enemies’ (KAI 224:9ff.).

In this text, !yt is used to extrapose a pronominal DirObj in order to create a pragmatic effect, like in Classical Arabic. Cf. Quran 1:5 !iyyāka na"budu wa-!iyyāka nasta"īn ‘It is You we worship and You we ask for help’


and see Fischer 1987, § 272: ‘!iyyā- dient auch zur Voranstellung des pronominalen Obj.’).43 Thus in both cases !yt as the pronominal host is used for a serious reason.

Summing up:

In Old Western Aramaic, pronominal DirObjs were bound on verb forms. PC sometimes hosted object pronouns via the “presuffixal nun,” as described above. The DOM !yt as the pronominal host was used only in cases of sheer need, unlike in part of later Western Aramaic (e. g., Na-bataean, Christian Palestinian Aramaic), as we will see in the continuation of this study. 2. Mesopotamian Aramaic of the Neo-Assyrian period

The available corpus dealt with in this section was most recently de-scribed in Lemaire 2008, where one also finds the state of the art on the publication progress. The corpus consists of private law documents writ-ten on clay tablets. By now, “some seventy Aramaic tablets or fragments of Aramaic tablets” have been published (Lemaire 2008:77). For the reader’s convenience, we will quote the beginning of André Lemaire’s description (ibid.):

“The Aramaic of Upper Mesopotamia during the seventh century B. C. is essentially known through the Aramaic labels (“dockets”) and tablets from the Neo-Assyrian period and the very beginning of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The Aramaic labels are generally very short, four lines at the most, hence we shall concentrate here on the Aramaic tablets.”

The corpus has no overt prenominal DOM, unlike Old Western Aramaic (section 1) and Egyptian Aramaic of the Achaemenid period (section 3). Consider some examples of definite DirObjs coded by Ø:

(1) hn y˹n˺qh !š! ‘If he redeems the man …’ (Bachelot–Fales 2005, No. 47:7).

(2) hn yhtwn44 ksp! ypdyn !š!

43 !iyyā- as a host for pronominal DirObjs appears only twenty-four times in

Quran. Economic use of *!iyāt in this syntactic slot forms an isogloss berween Qu-ran and our corpus.


‘If they bring the money, they will ransom the man’ (Le-maire 2001, No. 4*:13f., Tell aš-Šuyūx Fawqani).45

If we take the DefArt of ksp-! and !š-! seriously, we witness definite DirObjs, inanimate and animate, receiving zero coding. In the example that follows, Old Western Aramaic would have pre-

posed !yt to the DirObj !mhm, because it is referential but cannot take the DefArt since it hosts a bound possessive pronoun (cf. our section 1):

(3) PN1 w-PN2 !mhm šmw qdm PN3

‘PN1 and PN2 placed their boundary stone (?) in front of PN3’ (Fales 1986, No. 58:1ff., obv.).

There is no consensus about the meaning of !mhm or the exact legal contents of the document. See Fales 1986:254ff., Hug 1993:25, DNWSI 68. In terms of suggested etymologies and the expected contents, the most viable alternative to “their boundary stone” is “their matter/affair” (cf. Hug ibid.: ‘brachten ihre Angelegenheit’). Yet this uncertainty does not mar the usefulness of the sentence for grammatical description. Be the noun in question concrete (‘boundary stone’) or abstract (‘matter’), the noun phrase !mhm is a referring expression all the same. As we will see in the continuation of the inquiry, this parsimonious

way of dealing with the nominal DirObj is an isogloss of NA Mesopota-mian Aramaic with Nabataean Aramaic, and to some extent with Aramaic of Palestinian Talmud and Samaritan Aramaic as represented by the first book of Memar Marqah. In the corpus, there happen to be no pronominal DirObjs.

EXCURSUS: Encoding of the DirObj in the rest of pre-Achaemenid texts (~ 700–515 B. C.)

The earliest dated evidence for Achaemenid Aramaic is TADAE B1.1. It is a land lease agreed upon “in year 7 of King Darius, the 6th of Meµir,” i. e., June 3, 515 B. C. In this Excursus, we will review the evidence of all

44 We believe the spelling yhtwn must stand for the expected yhytwn lit. ‘they

will bring,’ cf. the spellings of the C-stem √ !ty without /y/ adduced in DNWSI 136 and Muraoka–Porten 2003:140 (in both cases, these are Egyptian Aramaic letters, mostly from Hermopolis). Fales 1996:101f. reads lhtwn and believes this is a C-stem “long” PC of ntn ‘to give’ with an asseverative l-. He translates ‘If they actually give back the sum.’ All this is hardly tenable.

45 Bachelot–Fales 2005, No. 47:13f. read differently (as in Fales 1996:101f., see the previous footnote).


pre-Achaemenid texts whose sentences possess DirObjs and which have not been dealt with in our Section 1 and are not part of the clearly defin-able (and hopefully linguistically homogeneous) corpus of legal texts that we have just discussed. A. KAI 233 (the Assur Ostracon)

This letter, almost unique within the period in terms of genre (the other one is KAI 266, the “Adonbrief ”), has been dated to around 650 on historical grounds (see, e. g., Gibson 1975:99ff., Fales 2010:194–200).46 The potsherd consisting of a few adjoining pieces, written in ink, was found in the vicinity of the western wall of Assur (ibid. 194). Due to its contents, the letter is believed to have been penned in Uruk (i. e., in the southernmost part of Babylonia). A.1. DirObj is a noun

Definite personal DirObjs (including personal names) receive zero cod-ing, like in NA Mesopotamian Aramaic. Consider a couple of philologic-ally transparent examples:

(1) nbwzrkn w-!µšy !pqnrbyl šm

‘Upāq-ana-Arbail captured Nabû-zer-ukin and Ahhešay’ (KAI 233:10).

(2) hlw PN "zrk šlµt qdm[yk]

‘Now, I have sent PN as your helper before [you]’ (KAI 233:13).

Note that in both sentences Old Western Aramaic would have used !yt, since the two DirObjs are referential and cannot take DefArt. The same is true of the following example with an inanimate DirObj:

(3) ydhm ktbt

‘I inscribed their hands’ (KAI 233:9).

The only indefinite DirObj in the document is collective and parono-mastic (cf. Hug 1993:127, 150):

(4) šb˹y šbh˺ PN mn GN [w-šby] šbh PN2 mn GN2, w-šby šbh PN3 mn GN3 w-šb[y šbh] PN4 mn GN4

46 Fales 2010 offers the latest philological interpretation of KAI 233. Our un-

derstanding of the text still leaves much to be desired, mostly due to the poor state of its preservation (see a picture at http://cal.huc.edu/calpage.php?filename =14550&subtext=).


‘PN took captives from GN, and PN2 took [captives] from GN2, and PN3 took captives from GN3, and PN4 took cap-[tives] from GN4’ (KAI 233:15f.).47

The OV word order is ubiquitous in KAI 233 (unlike in documents of private law), so it hardly influences the coding of DirObj.48 A.2. DirObj is a pronoun

KAI 233 harbours twelve object pronouns in relatively reliable contexts. They are governed by the Preterit, PC, and the Imperative. In the his-torical perspective of our inquiry, we have to make two observations re-garding these tokens. First, in this letter there are no nun-full forms of PC + bound pronouns.

In KAI 233, PC takes only 3mpl. object pronouns, all of them are not bound on the verb form (see below). Therefore we do not know if this Western Aramaic variety used -n-, although the cumulative evidence of Western Aramaic (from Sefire to contemporary Maalula) intimates it had to. Second, ten out of these twelve object pronouns are 3mpl. forms (=

‘them’ [m.]). Of the ten, eight have the shape hmw and are orthograph-ically separated from their governing verbs with a space. Consider some of the examples (the list is available in Hug 1993:55):

(5) yhb hmw ly mr!y mlk! ‘the king my lord gavePRET them to me’ (KAI 233:7).

(6) !µz! hmw ‘I wantPC to see them’ (KAI 233:14).

(7) w-qr! hmw ‘and callIMV them’ (KAI 233:12).

Besides, there are two problematic tokens of 3mpl. object pronouns. The first is š!lh˹m˺[w] ‘ask them’ (KAI 233:12, m is partly preserved, w is gone): the problem is not so much the damaged condition of the crucial letters as the lack of spacing before the object pronoun ‘them,’ which is probably a “typo,” i. e., an orthographic inconsistency. The second one is !šh !klt-hm w-mr!y ‘fire consumed them, and my lord …’ (KAI 233:17). In this case, the bound pronoun -hm ‘them,’ known from Old Western Ara-maic, was used instead of the expected autonomous pronoun hmw, which

47 šbh is the 3ms. Preterit ‘catch, capture’, šby is a collective noun ‘Gefangenen-

schar.’ 48 As the reader will learn in I.3.1, Folmer 1995 suggests that in Egyptian Ara-

maic the word order may have to do with the appearance of the DOM l-. We will show that this idea is wrong.


goes against the usage in the rest of the document. This inconsistency has been satisfactorily explained as a combination of two “typos,” a lack of spacing and an omission of w due to the following letter string starting with w: w-mr!y. Thus Hug 1993:21 posits a scribal omission in his translit-eration: !šh !klthm<w> wmr!y. What is new in this text: the autonomous (or “detached”) 3mpl. object

pronoun hmw is orthographically identical to the 3mpl. subject pronoun of KAI 233 (see the list of examples in Hug 1993:55). The subject pro-noun hmw is attested in the Old Western Aramaic corpus as well, along with hm (Degen 1969:55). Hmw is the 3mpl. subject pronoun in Egyptian Aramaic (cf. TADAE B3.1:14f., B2.4:6f., D7.1:12). The base *hum/hun is the source of the “they” pronouns in Aramaic till the present day, cf. e. g. h3nn3k ‘they’ in Turoyo (Jastrow 2002:23). Note that the 3mpl. object pronoun in Old Western Aramaic was ex-

pressed by the inherited pre-Aramaic bound form -hm; see the list of ex-amples in Degen 1969:80.49 In parts of pre-modern Aramaic, e. g. in Achaemenid Aramaic and Syriac, subject and object third person plural pronouns are materially identical the way they are in KAI 23350 (unless the third person plural pronominal DirObj is hosted on a DOM), while in some other written varieties they are not, as e. g. in Samaritan Aramaic (Macuch 1982:224–236), Aramaic of Palestinian Talmud (Dalman 1905: 299–328), and once in Christian Palestinian Aramaic (Müller-Kessler 1991:261: ydbrynhwn ‘er leitet sie’). The latter corpora preserve bound pronouns in this slot. Muraoka–Porten 2003:143, fn. 670 posit that the 3mpl. bound form “as in some J<ewish>A<ramaic> dialects and Sa-maritan Aramaic is best regarded as a secondary, analogical develop-ment,” but this solution begs the question. The Proto-Aramaic forms of 3pl. bound object pronouns must have

looked, for the masculine and feminine genders respectively, as -*hum(u)/ hin(a). Within the whole of the first millennium B. C. Aramaic, reflexes of -*hum(u) as an object pronoun are regularly attested only in the early monumental inscriptions (= our “Old Western Aramaic”), yet, as we have just mentioned, they reappear in later Western Aramaic varieties. In

49 As it follows from the present study (I.1.2), Old Western Aramaic could also

code the pronominal DirObj via *!iyāt + possessive pronouns, but it happened only under non-trivial synactic or pragamatic pressure.

50 Save for crasis h >!/Ø in case of enclitic object pronouns. This natural fea-ture of oral performance is sometimes reflected in orthographies, e. g., in Syriac.

28 Articles: Semitic Studies the course of our study, we will interpret this non-trivial evidence in terms of historical dialectology of Aramaic. In contrast to the opinion given in the last paragraph, Gzella 2008:93

says that 3pl. “object suffixes still regularly occur in older Aramaic up to the Hermopolis letters from the late sixth or early fifth century B. C.,” but this is wrong. Gzella bases his statement on Volker Hug’s Grammar. Hug 1993:59 incorrectly lists הם- in the table “Das Objektsuffix.” His only evidence is למושרתהם ‘um sie zu schicken,’ appearing in a Hermopolis let-ter (now TADAE A.2.2:13). Note that Hug had set out to produce a grammar of all Aramaic texts admittedly written between 700 and 500 B. C. in various areas of the Near East, though their linguistic homogene-ity is doubtful. Therefore the corpus of Hug’s Grammar is ill-chosen. In particular, the time-honoured concept of the Hermopolis letters (now TADAE A2.1–7) not being a part of the Achaemenid Egyptian Aramaic is amiss, so their inclusion in the 700–500 B. C. corpus was not a prudent decision. When TADAE A2.1–7 were written we do not know. Their fa-mous linguistic peculiarities (see now Gzella 2011:582f.) are best ex-plained not as belonging to “a typologically older variety of Aramaic pre-sent in Egypt even before Persian times” (ibid. 582) but as adstrate fea-tures, i. e. they must be due to the writers’ imperfect command of the Achaemenid usage. Note in particular that “possessive suffixes of the 2/3mpl. ending in /-n/” and “periphrastic imperative” (ibid. 583) of the Hermopolis letters are typologically advanced features. We believe that the bound pronoun of l-mwšrt-hm ‘in order to send them’ is a possessive form. This is corroborated by its appearance in Aµikar, another Egyptian Aramaic text: mnµtwt-hm ‘to put them down’ (C1.1:170).51 Muraoka–Por-ten 2003:144, fn. 670 observe: “Hug (1993:59) gives הם- as an object suf-fix, which is, however, misleading, since it occurs in his corpus only as at-tached to an infinitive.” We will deal with the possible traces of bound ad-verbal -hm in Egyptian Aramaic in I.3.2. In addition to the above twelve object pronouns, KAI 233:6 has a

character sequence !ythm in a hopelessly broken context. The sign string is plausibly believed to render a 3mpl object pronoun bound on the

51 Note that the m-infinitive of the C-stem is another exclusive isogloss of Her-

mopolis and Aµikar within the extant Egyptian Aramaic (cf. already Porten–Greenfield 1968:221f., with two more tokens from Aµikar) and in the whole of “pre-Middle” Aramaic. M-infinitive is another advanced feature of Hermopolis letters. It appears in various Middle Aramaic idioms, in particular Syriac and Jew-ish Palestinian Aramaic (Dalman 1905:278, 281, 403; Golomb 1985:133).


DOM !yt: !ythm ‘themACC’. Thus the Aramaic variety represented by KAI 233 did not have the prenominal DOM !yt but kept it as a host for object pronouns. This last feature is reminiscent of Dan 3:12 (see I.4.2 in the continuation of this study) and later Western Aramaic varieties. B. KAI 225–226 (The Nerab Inscriptions)

These are funerary inscriptions (a total of twenty-three short lines) writ-ten in a kind of monumental Aramaic script and found at a site of Nerab, just south-east of Aleppo. The dating is unknown. The scholarly tradition has it ca. 700 B. C. (the most optimistic appraisal) or at any rate within the seventh century. The up-to-date source of encyclopaedic knowledge on KAI 225–226 is Yun 2006. B.1. DirObj is a noun

Like in NA Mesopotamian Aramaic and KAI 233, there is no prenominal DOM. In particular, !yt is lacking where it stands in Old Western Ara-maic. Consider an example:

(1) l-thns !r´ty ‘do not drag away my grave’52 (KAI 226:8).

‘My grave’ (!r´ty) refers in particular to the very tombstone bearing the inscription, while (to cite our RULE from I.1.1) Old Western Aramaic uses !yt if (and only if ) a referring DirObj noun phrase cannot take DefArt as a morphosyntactic signal of its definiteness. Note that the idiom of KAI 225–226 is different from Old Western Aramaic at various points (Yun 2006), in particular ‘to kill’ in KAI 225:11 is k¢l, while it is qtl in Sefire. B.2. DirObj is a pronoun

(2) w-mwt lµh yk¢lwk

‘and may they <the four above-mentioned gods> kill you with evil death’ (KAI 225:10f.).

(3) w-thnsny

‘(whoever you are who do wrong) and drag me away’ (KAI 226:9).

52 Gibson 1975:97 translates thns as passive of the C-stem: ‘My grave should

not be dragged away.’ This is wrong since the funerary inscription is explicitely addessed, as its genre requires, to the one who would meddle with the tomb.

30 Articles: Semitic Studies The verb form in (2), yk¢lwk, is a jussive, while thnsny is an indicative. Whether it had a presuffixal nun, we cannot judge, though this is not excluded (see the forthcoming section I.3.2 for a comprehensive discussion of the issue). C. The Remaining Texts

The rest of the disparate texts admittedly stemming from the period 700–500 B. C. and relevant to our study include a general legal norm (Hug 1993:14–15, “Gesetz gegen Abgabenhinterziehung”) of unknown provenance and date; KAI 266 (“Adonbrief ”), written most probably in Eqron (Palestine) and dated to 604–603 B. C. on historical grounds; and a one-line inscription on a Luristan bronze bowl (Hug 1993:17, accord-ing to whom it dates “um 600 v. Chr.”). The diagnostic features central for our sections I.1–I.3 are either zero-

coded or not attested: there are no analytical DOMs, no 3pl object pro-nouns, as well as no nun-full forms of pronouns suffixed to PC. The few available tokens of DirObjs are syntactically identical to those discussed in the rest of this section. By way of illustration, we will adduce two well-preserved examples of referential nominal DirObjs:

(1) m¢!w !pq ‘they have reached Apeq’ (KAI 266:4, Eqron).

(2) ktb !b!´r ks! znh ‘Ab-u´ur inscribed this bowl’ (Hug 1993:17, Luristan).

* * * To sum up the evidence gathered in Section 1.2:

1. The demonstrably complete lack of a prenominal DOM opposes all the texts discussed here to both the eighth-century inscriptions and the Achaemenid corpus, and forms a reliable isogloss with certain later em-bodiments of Western Aramaic. 2. The data on pronominal DirObjs are too meagre to draw any con-

clusions and produce comparative statements. In particular, there are no critical contexts revealing the (non-)existence of the presuffixal nun.

Finally, the question “How many ‘dialects’ are attested in Section I.2 cor-pus?” cannot be answered with the help of our data on DirObj encoding.

3. Egyptian Aramaic of the Achaemenid Period

The whole corpus of Egyptian Aramaic is now conveniently accessible in a four-volume set “Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt”


(TADAE A–D) by Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni.53 It is about the size of our Ugaritic corpus and thus the earliest evidence of Aramaic easily lend-ing itself to a synchronic syntactic description. The material relevant to our study includes letters on papyri, leather and ostraca, documents of private law, and literature (the Behistun inscription, Aµikar and bar Punesh).54 When quoting this Edition in the present section, we drop the abbreviation TADAE and use sigla from A to D for the four volumes, then there follow numerals that stand for the section within the volume, the document number and that of the quoted line, e. g. B2.6:3. When we quote from the Aramaic version of the Behistun Inscription (= TADAE C2.1) in 3.1.2.2, the first number stands for the column, the second one for the line, e. g. 5:13. Since the English of the translations is among the weaker points of TADAE, we edited some of the translations we had to use. 3.0. Theoretical Preliminaries on the DOM l-

The only explicit pre-nominal DOM used in the corpus is l-. Under cer-tain conditions, it hosts pronominal DirObjs as well (3.2). The distribu-tion of pre-nominal l- and Ø- has been studied by the Dutch scholar Mar-garetha Folmer (Folmer 1995:340–371). According to Folmer, l- “pre-cedes a PN or a definite noun referring to a living being” (p. 340), and we believe she is right, pace the opinion voiced in Muraoka–Porten 2003, the standard reference Grammar of Egyptian Aramaic (see 3.1.2.2 below). Thus the task of the overt pre-nominal DOM in Old Western Aramaic

has nothing to do with that found in Egyptian Aramaic. In a nutshell, and with a bit of simplification, the yield of our section 1 is as follows:

In Old Western Aramaic the pre-nominal DOM !yt is used for one purpose only, to supply a definite DirObj noun phrase with an overt marker of definiteness wherever it is lacking in the respective noun phrase for some reason or other.

53 For one reason or other, the authors did not include a few texts. We cite

one of them according to the CAL version. 54 We are aware that some scholars believe Aµikar represents a different Ara-

maic variety. Thus Lemaire 2008:87 regrets no seeing Aµikar in the corpus of Hug 1993. Yet we see no good cause to exclude literary texts from the Egyptian Aramaic corpus. It stands to reason that the syntax of creative writing may prove richer than that of letters and contracts, and this will explain why we address Aµikar so often in the present section.

32 Articles: Semitic Studies This is to say, between Old Western Aramaic and Egyptian Aramaic

there exists a break of continuity both in terms of DOM hardware (!yt vs. l-) and its meaning. In Egyptian Aramaic, the pre-nominal DOM l- serves a different and typologically trivial end (cf. 0.1), to signal a definite ani-mate noun phrase in the DirObj slot, the one which may well have its own markers of definiteness, e. g., the postpositive article. The Aramaic !yt is straightforward: it is only good to usher in the DirObj.

As for the Aramaic l-, it is equivocal and versatile: first, it is “allative” (i. e., encoding motion towards a landmark: ‘to[wards],’ French ‘vers’); second, it is dative (encoding recipient and interlocutor: ‘give to,’ ‘say to’); finally it is able to introduce DEF ANIM DirObjs. The semantic development of l- in Aramaic is transparent: ALLATIVE > DATIVE > ACCUSATIVE, in the way of the Latin preposition ad ‘to(wards)’ ending up a DOM in certain Romance varieties, while keeping all its etymologically earlier senses. Speculatively, we reconstruct the details of the diachronic path as

follows: the ALLATIVE > DATIVE shift is self-explanatory, while the shift DATIVE > ACCUSATIVE first came to pass in those sentences whose DirObjs had an air of recipient/interlocutor about them. This means that for the DATIVE > ACCUSATIVE shift to come about in the first place, the DirObjs had to be human, while the verbs had to be seman-tically low-transitive in the sense of Hopper–Thompson 1980, so that the OBJECT participant be on the verge of “DATIVE” and “ACCUSA-TIVE”: ‘to command/order,’ ‘to bless/praise,’ ‘to cure.’ These rigid re-strictions on l- as a DirObj marker were then being gradually lifted within individual Aramaic varieties in the course of their history, with different outputs. As is clear from 0.1, the motive of such scenario is to keep apart a

definite animate Agent and an equally definite animate Patient. But this granted, a simpler development comes to mind: since the preposition l- as a dative marker is prefixed almost exclusively to animate indirect ob-jects, the language may have given it an additional meaning by prefixing it tout d’un coup to each and every definite animate Patient, whatever the semantics of the transitive verb in question. It remains to be established which of the alternatives is more viable.

3.1. DirObj is a noun

In this part of the section, we will follow in the wake of Folmer’s study, discussing her results and trying to improve on them wherever we see a chance to do so. Given the state of the art, anyone familiar with Folmer’s


painstaking analysis dare not attempt the inquiry from scratch, as it were.55 3.1.1. Evidence Supporting the RULE

To help the reader form his own judgement, we will first present the whole of the transparent positive evidence in support of the RULE. Perus-ing Folmer 1995:340–371, we have gleaned the thirteen below examples that in her view constitute crystal clear evidence:56

(1) k"n hn nµt !nt 1 l-mnpy !l tšbq l-PN

‘Now, if you come down to Memphis all by yourself, do not leave PN. [Give him some grain]’ (A3.8:10f.).

(2) !nh [!]tyt bytk l-mntn ly l-brtk mp¢<µ>yh l-!ntw

‘I [c]ame to your house so that you might give me your daughter Miptahiah for wifehood’ (B2.6:3).

(3) !nh !tyt "lyk l-mntn ly l-tmt šmh zy !mtk l-!ntw

‘I came to you in order that you give me the one called Tamet, who is your maidservant, for wifehood’ (B3.3:3).

(4) w-!nh mšlm mµr !w ywm !µrn l! !kl !n´l l-pl¢y mn tµt lbbk br mn zy !nt ttrk l-!mh tmt

‘And I, Mešullam, shall not be able, in the future, to take Pil-ti away from you, except that you divorce his mother Tamet’ (B3.3:13).

(5) w-šbqt l-yhyšm" šmh brtky

‘And I delivered (from bondage) the one called Yehoišma, your daughter’ (B3.6:4).

(6) !nh !tyt "l[yk b-by]tk w-š!lt mnk l-nšn yhwyšm" šmh !µtk l-!ntw

‘I came to y[ou in] your [hou]se and asked you for the one called lady Yehoišma, your sister, for wifehood’ (B3.8:3).

(7) w-ktšt l-!ntty w-nksn k-µsn hnpqt mn byty

55 Note that Folmer had to use pre-TADAE editions. Since the authors of

TADAE collated anew the entire corpus, some texts that had been used in Folmer 1995:340–371 received new readings. Wherever a new reading renders an example adduced in Folmer 1995 irrelevant, we drop it silently.

56 Here and elsewhere, we exclude from the count the evidence of the Behis-tun Inscription, to be treated in 3.1.2.2.


‘And you struck my wife and took out goods from my house by force’ (B7.2:5).

(8) w-l-!ntt! zylk l! ktšt w-nksn mn bytk k-µsn l! lqµt

‘And I did not strike (that) wife of yours, and I did not take goods from your house by force’ (B7.2:9).

(9) [s]pr! µkym! y"¢ !twr klh zy hqym l-brh

‘The wise [sc]ribe, counselor of Assyria, all of it, who estab-lished his son’ (C1.1:12).

(10) !zlt hškµt l-!µyqr [znh]

‘I went, I found [this] Aµiqar’ (C1.1:76).

(11) mlk! š!l l-gbry! t[ryn !lk]

‘The king asked [those] t[wo] men’ (C1.1:77).57

(12) šbqt l-rµmyk

‘You left your friends’ (C1.1:112).

(13) w-yq¢l !yš l-m[r!]h "l dbr ksph

‘And a man will kill his ma[ster] on account of his silver’ (С1.2:23).

Five examples come from literature (Aµiqar and bar Punesh),58 one is from a private letter on papyrus, and the rest are from contracts and judi-cial records. The remaining letters on papyri found in Egypt provide no examples of the DOM l- (Folmer 1995:354), and this is because they do not happen to have syntactic slots that satisfy the RULE.59 See also Muraoka–

57 The plot of the story and the context justify the restoration. 58 The sixth one will be TADAE C1.1:1: [!lh] mly !µyqr šmh spr µkym w-mhyr zy

µkm l-brh ‘[these are the] words of the one called Aµiqar, a wise and skilfull scribe, which he taught his son.’ Folmer 1995:358 treats the l- of l-brh as nota objecti (= DOM), yet on p. 349 she counts µkm (i. e., most probably the D-stem of the root) among “verbs obligatorily linked to their complements by the preposition l-.” Folmer borrowed the notion of l-verbs as a class in its own right from Muraoka 1992 and gave it a lot of attention in her treatment of the DOM l-. We will deal with the problem in our Section 7, Dead Sea Scrolls Aramaic.

59 Folmer 1995:355 is not sure whether the l- of the following sentence is DOM, for she was unable to prove that šby ‘to capture’ is not an l-verb (see the preceding footnote), due to an assumed lack of evidence: k"n hn l! šbw l-ntn tmh ynpq "ly w-!hk !grs ‘now, if they did not capture Natan there, let him go out to me and I will go to grind’ (D7.10:6f.). She adds (fn. 351) that C1.2:5 “is of no help” in


Porten 2003:262f. for a partly overlapping list of examples, with rudi-mentary commentaries. We will immediately draw the reader’s attention to a non-trivial fact

overlooked by Folmer: the Egyptian Aramaic corpus has only two sen-tences, (11) and (12), in which an arthrous (or otherwise definite) DirObj in the plural is introduced by l-. We will get back to this fact in 3.1.2.1 be-low and in the Summing-up for I.3.1.

* * * Folmer points out various exceptions to her RULE, and she does not find cogent explanations for them. It turns out that the overall number of ex-ceptions exceeds the number of examples obedient to the RULE. There-fore in the rest of 3.1 we will attempt to reinterpret some of the excep-tions found by Folmer, thus reducing their number and corroborating the validity of the RULE. 3.1.2. Lack of DOM where it should have appeared according to Folmer

This group of sentences divides into two: 3.1.2.1. Collective DirObj noun phrases do not count as animate,

perhaps not even as definite Folmer deliberates instances of the DOM l- lacking “where it should oc-cur” (p. 353f.). In her view, the respective DirObjs are grd! ‘domestic staff,’ µyl! ‘armed force, soldiers,’ µlky! ‘Cilicians,’ krky! ‘Carians,’ ywny! ‘Greeks’ (in the below contexts, all three ethnonyms refer to slaves from respective regions), and "bdyh ‘her slaves’. Let us consider Folmer’s ex-amples, starting with the nouns in the singular:

(14) smšk pqyd! qdmy! grd! w-nksy! zyln! [zy] b-m´ryn µsyn n¢r

‘Samšek, the former official, strictly guarded our domestic staff and goods [which are] in Egypt’ (A6.10:1f.).

(15) grd! w-nksy mr!yhm µsyn n¢rn

‘They are strictly guarding the domestic staff and goods of their lords’ (A6.10:4).

this respect, but this is wrong. The text in C1.2:5 runs as follows: w-šby! zy šbyt b-z! šnt! ‘and the captives, whom you captured this year.’ The lack of anaphoric pronoun in the relative clause proves that šby is a transitive verb (Muraoka–Porten 2003:168, § 42b), if this needs to be proven at all. Thus we luckily get our only example of the prenominal DOM l- in letters written on ostraca.

36 Articles: Semitic Studies (16) !ntm [!]tn´µw grd! wnksy[! zyl]y µsyn ¢rw

‘You, be diligent. Strictly guard m[y] domestic staff and goods’ (A6.10:5f.).

(17) grd! lm zy mr!ty ktš

‘… saying: “He has assaulted the domestic staff of my lady” ’ (A6.15:8f.).

Exx. (14)–(17) have to do with the 5th century Persian governor of Egypt Arsames. The letters cited in (14)–(16) were written by him, while the one cited in (17) was addressed to him by another Persian official. The noun grd! is an Old Persian Fremdwort;60 it is not attested in Aramaic outside the Arsames correspondence. Yet it is at least partly aramaicized, since it has an appropriate construct form grd as well (DNWSI 233).

(18) !yty b!r µdh zy bnyh bg[w] b[y]rt! w-myn l! µsrh l-hšqy!INF µyl!

‘There is a well which has been built in the fortress and (which) does not lack water to give the garrison to drink’ (A4.5:6f.).61

What happens is that the nouns grd! ‘domestic staff ’ and µyl! ‘armed force’ are not animate but rather collective. That is why they do not need the DOM l-. This relation between meaning and form has parallels in the world’s languages. Thus in Russian we say ja uvidel čelovek-a ‘I saw a/the man’ (the accusative of this 2nd declension noun is overtly case-marked for animacy) vs. ja uvidel vzvod-Ø soldat ‘I saw a squad of soldiers’ (the accusa-tive of this 2nd declension noun is zero case-marked for inanimacy).62 The collective (and even mass) noun nature of µyl! shows through in

the fact that its attributive adjective can take the plural anarthrous form by way of agreement within a noun phrase. In the example that follows the mass noun sense of µyl! overrides its morphological definiteness (or, better yet, its arthrous shape):

(18a) !µr PN dbr m´ry! "m µyl! SG. ARTHR !µrnn PL. ANARTHR

‘Then, PN led the Egyptians with the other troop’ (A4.7:8).

Muraoka–Porten 2003:284 explain this lack of agreement in status by means of a convoluted “accusative of specification” for !µrnn (within a

60 DNWSI 233; Muraoka–Porten 2003:343. 61 In Egyptian Aramaic, the infinitives of derived stems have verbal government

(Muraoka–Porten 2003:274), unlike in Old Western Aramaic of the early inscrip-tions (cf. Section 1).

62 For a more detailed description, see Comrie 1979:14.


prepositional phrase headed by "m!!!), or, alternatively, as apposition, which “would virtually amount to the same thing” (ibid.). For another such example (cited ibid.), with !µrnn headed by a plural arthrous sub-stantive nksy! ‘belongings,’ they provide no explanation at all:

(18b) kn ydy" yhwy lk hn mn grd! !w mn nksy! !µrnn zyly mnd"m ksntw yhwh

‘Thus let it be known to you: if there be any decrease in the domestic staff or in my other goods …’ (A6.10:8).

Yet the reason for “disagreement in state” (ibid.) in the case of nksy! !µrnn ‘the other goods’ must be the same as in the case of µyl! !µrnn ‘the other troop,’ and we believe it is the collective semantics of both µyl!SG and nksy!PL.

63 On this note, we are going to shift to Folmer’s examples of collective

DirObj noun phrases in the plural. As mentioned above, the contexts of exx. (19)–(22) below make it clear that all relevant DirObj noun phrases refer to slaves.

(19) !µr µlky! gbrn 3+2 š!l mn [nµ]tµwr w-l! yhb ly

‘Then one asked [Naµ]tµor (to give me) the Cilicians, five men, but he did not give (them) to me’ (A6.15:3).

(20) hb l-mspt µlky! !lk 3+2 s¢r mn zy yhbw b-bb!l gbrn 3+2

‘Give to Masapata those Cilicians, five in number, besides those they gave (to him) in Babylon, five men in number’ (A6.15:4f.).

(21) !nµnh !štwyn kµd! w-plgn "lyn "bdyh zy mb¢µyh !mn

‘We were equal as one (= owned jointly) and divided be-tween us the slaves of Mibtahiah our mother’ (B2.11:3).

(22) w-ywny! w-krky! zy t!µd ¢r "mk h[!] ykhlwn l-mqrq l-´d pnh

‘Keep with you the Greeks and the Carians, the ones you are going to take. Look, they can flee in any direction’ (Segal 1983, No. 26:5f., the text follows the CAL publication).

63 As for µaylā ‘the army,’ the fact it can be the source of agreement in the

plural forms a non-trivial isogloss with Akkadian and Biblical Hebrew. The Akka-dian word in question is ´ābum ‘army, Arbeitskommando.’ For OB examples of agreement in both the singular and the plural, search http://www.archibab.fr. In BH, a very frequent noun hā"ām ‘the people,’ when used in the sense ‘militia, a voluntary corps,’ behaves this way as well, cf. a few among numerous examples from 1 Sam: 6:19, 8:19, 10:24 (plural agreement); 4:3, 13:8 (singular agreement).

38 Articles: Semitic Studies In these examples, it is the plural form that secures the collective

reading of the nouns. The dehumanizing language of slavery, looming or explicitly present in this group, may be relevant too, though its contribu-tion to the non-use of DOM cannot be pinpointed. To make our view clearer with an example, we believe that the referent of the DirObj noun phrase µlky! ‘Cilician slaves’ was thought of as collective (almost mass in the guise of plurale tantum) rather than a sum total of individuated hu-man beings. As we learned in 0.1, DOM is needed to signal salience/indi-viduation of the respective DirObj, while what we deal with in (19)–(22) is the opposite of individuation. The reader will notice that the risk of circular reasoning in the pre-

ceding paragraph is high. We start with the lack of l- and explain it by the allegedly collective nature of the respective noun phrases, while this collective nature is itself proven by the lack of l-. Yet we believe the num-ber, quality and homogeneity of examples support our exegesis, and in a moment we will see more textual evidence in support of our reasoning.

* * * Spanish supplies a partial but illuminating parallel for this kind of usage. Consider the following examples from Nueva gramática 2009:2635: La crisis produjo muchos desocupados (*“a muchos desocupados” has been re-jected by Nueva gramática as unacceptable), El huracán dejó veinte muertos (?“a veinte muertos”). The Nueva gramática (ibid., boldface added) inter-prets this usage in the way important for our inquiry:

Así pues, los objetos directos de persona en causar heridos, producer desocupados u ocasionar muertos denotan ‘lo causado’, ‘lo producido’ y ‘lo ocasionado’, pero no designan a los in-dividuos sobre los que se ejercen dichas acciones, sino más bien la clase de entidades a las que pertenecen. Se coordi-nan, pues, con naturalidad con complementos no persona-les, como en El huracan causó inundaciones, derrumbamientos y algunos muertos.

Note that this interpretation uses substantivized passive participles in the singular, with the neuter marker lo that explicitly cancels the animacy of the actual DirObj noun phrases: ‘lo causado’ = ‘muertos/víctimas,’64 ‘desocupados,’ etc.

64 Cf. El huracán dejó seis víctimas mortales en México (http://video.latam.msn.

com/watch/video/muertos-por-jova/1lkv1yv9f?cpkey=67e24008-b040-441b-8120-94374acfdbb1%257c%257c%257c%257c).


* * * Another collective plural (not referring to slaves) already appeared above in (18a), where the example was meant to support a different claim. We are now taking it up once more, along with a parallel text. The source of the parallels is a famous letter of Elephantine Jews to the governor of Judah. Luckily, the letter has come down to us in two extant drafts (A4.7 and A.4.8).

(23) !µr PN dbr m´ry! "m µyl! !µrnn

‘Then, PN led the Egyptians with the other troops’ (A4.7:8).

(23a) !µr PN zk dbr m´r[y! "m µyl! !µrnn]

‘Then, that PN led the Egypt[ians with the other troops]’ (A4.8:7).

Since the two drafts were written by different scribes (Porten 1998), the lack of l- before DirObjs in these sentences must reflect the norm of Achaemenid Aramaic. Note that our translations follow those of TADAE, while Folmer 1995:353, fn. 347 interprets the texts differently (dbr be-comes ‘the commander [of the Egyptians]’) and hardly plausibly. She probably did so to obviate an assumed counterexample. Folmer also discarded, after a short but tortuous discussion (p. 359,

fn. 363) one more example of the collective DirObj in the guise of a plural:

(24) w-b-ywmn !µrnn y!kl […] mh w-t!bd ´dqt! w-!y[š l! y"bd] ´dqh l-!bwhy w-yzb[n….] ksp w-yhnpq !yš […] w-ytqlnhy b-ydh65 w-yq¢l !yš l-m[r!]h "l dbr ksph w[…]l[…] mr!h w-yšwh !yš

66 bny mr!yhm […] b-spnn l-qblh

‘And in the last days he/it eat […], and justice shall perish, and a ma[n shall not do] justice to his father and he will sel[l … for] silver. And a man will bring out (= will deliver?) … […] and he will weigh it in his hand.67 And a man will kill his ma[ster] on account of his silver and … […] his lord. And a man will place the sons of their lords […] on ships oppo-site him’ (C1.2:21–24).

This text of the Bar Punesh prophesy is badly damaged, yet what is left allows one to posit that the difference between yq¢l !yš l-mr!h ‘every-

65 A varia lectio in the manuscript has -yd- rather than -lb-. 66 The y was added above the line. 67 The editors note: “MAY BE CORRECTED TO/FROM: ponder it in his heart.”

40 Articles: Semitic Studies body will kill his lord’ [+DOM] and yšwh !yš bny mr!yhm […] ‘everybody will place the sons of their lords’ [–DOM] is due simply to the grammati-cal number of the respective DirObj noun phrases. The truth is we have just seen eight morphosyntactically “definite” plural DirObj noun phrases denoting human beings (if we count 23 and 23a as two tokens), all of them without DOM, which means the language processed these eight noun phrases as inanimate. There are only two such DirObjs left in the corpus, and they are provided with DOM. These contrasting exam-ples were already adduced as (11) above, mlk! š!l l-gbry! t[ryn !lk] ‘The king asked [those] t[wo] men’ (C1.1:77), and (12) above, šbqt l-rµmyk ‘you left your friends’ (C1.1:112). According to our interpretation, ‘your friends’ (and a fortiori ‘those two men,’ the referential ones) display the kind of individuation ‘Cilicians’ (and all eight tokens just discussed) do not. The evidence is too meagre to advance any further.

* * * Finally, in the proverbs of Aµikar we have come across two examples in which the DOM l- fails to appear pace Folmer’s criteria and which are not listed in Folmer 1995 (cf. p. 358: “There are no instances in the proverbs in which the nota objecti is lacking where one would expect it”):

(25) !l thµšk brk mn µ¢r

‘Do not withhold your son from the stick (= do not leave him unpunished)’ (C1.1:176).

Compare C1.1:12, already cited above as (9) in the list of tokens obe-dient to the rule:

(25a) [s]pr! µkym! y"¢ !twr klh zy hqym l-brh

‘The wise [sc]ribe, counselor of Assyria, all of it, who estab-lished his son.’

The only relevant difference between the two sentences that comes to mind is that br-h ‘his son’ is referential as a character of the Story, while br-k ‘your son’ is not. Yet the observation may be oversubtle. The culprit noun of the second example is !nš! ‘human being.’ Its ar-

throus form is used generically in Aramaic: !nš! = The Man (as a species), while an individual male Homo sapiens is br !nš! ‘a son of Man.’ Here is the proverb:

(26) šgy!n [k]wkb[y šmy! zy] šmhthm l! yd" !yš. h! kn !nš! l! yd" !yš


‘Many are the stars of heaven whose names nobody knows [l! yd" !yš]. In the same way [h! kn], nobody knows (= under-stands) the Man’ (C1.1:164).

The DirObj noun phrase !nš! has here a generic reading. Informally speaking, generics are akin to collectives: the degree of their “definiteness” is diminished in comparison with that of a referential count noun phrase. Thus our line of reasoning regarding grd! ‘domestic staff ’ and µyl! ‘armed force’ applies here even better, since !nš! in this sen-tence is completely disembodied, while grd! is the domestic staff of Arsa-mes, the writer and the addressee of the respective letters. 3.1.2.2. Evidence of the Behistun Inscription is irrelevant

for the study of DOM In certain cases Folmer relates the absence of DOM where the rule re-quires it to the word order OV. Folmer’s crucial witness for the word-order relevance is the Aramaic version of the Behistun Inscription (now TADAE C2.1): “From this text it can be concluded that the nota objecti in most instances is lacking when the direct object precedes the verb form” (Folmer 1995:363, cf. 360f.), yet she indicates a couple of exceptions to this exception (Folmer 1995:363). Why the DOM of Egyptian Aramaic should be sensitive to word order in this way is not clear: since the de-fault word-order in the language was not OV, it is the DirObj of OV sen-tences that we would expect to be flagged more carefully, so that the ad-dressee could decode the message easier. As another piece of evidence in support of her claim, Folmer adds the OV sentences without the DOM l- just cited in 3.1.2.1, but from our analysis it follows that we do not need the word-order hypothesis to explain the lack of l- there. In the case of the Behistun Inscription, the solution is simple: the

DOM l- appears (with one exception) wherever the Akkadian text has the DOM ana (whatever the semantics of the DirObj), the DOM l- is lacking wherever the Akkadian text does not have the DOM ana, so the word-order of the Aramaic version is irrelevant to our inquiry, as well as the text itself. Consider the evidence.68

68 The Akkadian text is that of Malbran-Labat 1994. We follow her numbering

by paragraph. For the reader’s convenience, we have added the page number and (at our own responsibility) the printed line number, e. g. § 23, 98:6f. The restorations in both versions are reliable due to the repetitive nature of the text.


DOM l- = DOM ana: (27) [µyl! zy]ly q¢lw l-mrdy! ‘[the troop of ] mine killed the rebels’

(5:13).

ú-qu at-tu-u-a ana ni-[ik-ru-tú id-du-ku] ‘My troop killed the rebels’ (§ 23, 98:6f.).

(28) µyl! zyly l-mr[d]y! [q]¢lw ‘The troop of mine [k]illed the re[b]els’ (5:16).

ú-qu at-tu-u-a ana ni-ik-ru-tu id-du-ku ‘The troop of mine killed the rebels’ (§ 23, 98:11f.).

(29) µyl! zy l[y q]¢lw l-mrd[y!] !lk ‘The troop of [mine k]illed those rebel[s]’ (7:33).

ú-qu ˹a˺t-tu-u-˹a a˺na ˹ú˺-qu ni-ik-ru-tu4 id-˹du-ku˺ ‘My troops killed the rebel troops’ (§ 31, 100:17f.)

(30) "d !nh q¢lt l-gwmt mgwš! [zk] ‘Till I [kil]led Gaumata, [that] Ma-gian’ (11:74).

a-di UGU šá a-na-ku a-na Igu-ma-a-ti a-ga-šu-ú LÚ ma-gu-šú ad-du-ku ‘Until I killed that Gaumata the Magian’ (§ 54, 105:22f.).

DOM is not preposed to a definite animate DirObj, including a personal name:

(31) whwms [š]mh "ylmy prsy [l-!rr¢] šl[µt] ‘Vahumisa by [na]me, my servant, a Persian, [to Urartu I] s[ent]’ (5:19). Iú-mi-is-si šu-um-šú LÚ qal-la-a LÚ par-sa-a-a a-na KUR ú-ra-áš-¢u ana-ku áš-pur-ma al-ta-par ‘I sent my servant, a Persian named Vahumisa to Urartu’ (§ 24, 98:16f.).

(32) µyl! zy [prwrt q]¢lt ‘The troop of [Phraortes] I [k]illed’ (5:26)

ú-qu šá Ipa-ar-ú-mar-ti-iš [ni]-˹du˺-uk ‘We killed the army of Phraortes’ (§25, 99:2).

(33–34) !µr !nh µyl! [z]y b-prs z"yr <…> w-µyl! zy mdy zy "m[y hw]h šlµt ‘Then, I, the small troop [wh]ich was in Persia of Media <…> and the troop of Media which [wa]s with me—I sent’ (7:38f.)

ár-ki ana-ku ú-qu šá KUR par-su mi-i!-´i šá-ni-tu4 <…> ù ú-qu šá KUR ma-da-a-a šá pa-ni-ia ˹al˺-ta-par


‘Then I sent the other small troop which was in Persia <…> and the Median troops which were with me’ (§ 34, 101:2f.).

(35) !rtwrzy šmh prsy ["lym! zyly b-r!šhw]m šlµt ‘Artavarzia by name, a Persian, [the servant of mine, at the]ir [head] I sent’ (7:39f.). {} Iar-˹ta-mar˺-zi-ia ˹šu-um˺-šú LÚ qal-la-a LÚ par-sa-a-a ra-˹bu˺-ú ˹ina˺ UGU-˹šú-nu a-na˺ KUR par-su áš-pur ‘I sent a man, a Persian named Artavarziya, my servant, to Persia as their commander over them’ (§ 34, 101:3f.).

(36) wyzdt !µdw w-µr! zy "m[h] ‘Vahyazdata they seized and the nobles who (were) with [him]’ (8:48). Iú-[mi]-iz-da-a-tu4 ù LÚ DUMU.DÙ.MEŠ šá it-ti-šú u´-´ab-bi-tu ´ab-tu ‘They took captive Vahyazdata and the nobles who were with him’ (§ 34, 101:17f.).

We have found a counterexample as well. The Aramaic line in question is barely legible save for the critical DirObj noun phrase l-µylh ‘his troop,’ yet the surrounding text makes sure it should correspond to an Akkadian sentence without the DOM ana:

(37) [µy]l! [zyl]y q[¢lw] l-µylh [zy wyzdt] ‘The [troop] [of mi]ne ki[lled ]the troop [of Vahyazdata]’ (7:43).

ú-qu at-tu-u-a id-du-ku ú-qu šá Iú-mi-iz-da-a-tu4 ‘My troops killed the troops of Vahyazdata’ (§ 34, 101:9).

These facts enhance the possibility of the Aramaic version being a translation of the Akkadian text known to us.69 Muraoka-Porten 2003: 262, fn. 1052 correctly observe regarding DOM l- as used in TADAE C2.1: “This ל in the Bisitun inscription corresponds to /ana/ in the Ak-kadian version,” yet they do not ascribe any importance to this piece of evidence. Sure enough, this is because for them l- as DOM in Egyptian Aramaic “is optional” (p. 262), which is no less erroneous than the alleg-edly “optional” nature of !yt in the eighth-century inscriptions, as dis-

69 See discussions in Folmer 1995:741 and Muraoka–Porten 2003:233, fn. 963,

both times with references to previous studies.

44 Articles: Semitic Studies cussed in the first section of this study.70 What is diagnostically significant (and has gone unnoticed in previous research on the DOM l-) is that in (31)–(36) DOM is lacking in both Akkadian and Aramaic texts. To sum up: since the DOM l- in C2.1 translates Akkadian ana, while Ø

in the relevant slots corresponds to Ø in the Akkadian text, Folmer could have simply disregarded this evidence, thus reducing the number of her exceptions by six tokens. 3.1.3. DOM where in Folmer’s view it should not stand

Following is the evidence singled out in Folmer 1995 as going against the RULE in the sense that the rule does not require the DOM l- where it hap-pens to appear:

(38) nmr! pg" l-"nz! ‘The Leopard met the Goat’ (C1.1:166).

(39) µmr! rkb l-!tn! ‘The Donkey mounted the Jenny’ (C1.1:186).

(40) [l! µzh/yd"] !yš mh b-lbb knth w-kzy [yµ]zh gbr ¢b l-gbr lµ[h … l!] ylwh "mh b […] w-b"l !gr l! yhwh lh gbr ¢b "m g[br lµ]h71

‘A man [does not see/know] what is in the heart of his col-league and when a good person [s]ees a ba[d] person […] he shall [not] join with him on/in […] and a master of wages (= employer) shall not have (= hire) a good person with a [ba]d pe[rson]’ (C1.1:99f.).

(41) zy yhšpl l-!yš [r]m ‘The one who will humble an [exal]ted man …’ (C1.1:150).

(42) !nh yhbt lky l-byt! zy yhb ly mšlm br zkwr br !¢r !rmy zy swn b-dmwhy w-spr ktb ly "l!

70 The same has been repeated in Muraoka’s textbook of Egyptian Aramaic:

.to give me your daughter’ ” (B2.6:3)‘ למנתן לי לברתך :also marks a direct object ל-“However, the use of -ל is optional: אנה יהבת לכי לביתא זנה ‘I gave you this house.’

B2.7:5 || יהבת לך בתיא אלה ‘I gave you these houses’ (B3.7:14). The direct object marked with -ל is mostly determinate” (Muraoka 2012:75). Frankly, one cannot blame Muraoka–Porten 2003 and Muraoka 2012 for not having bought into Fol-mer’s RULE, because the relative number of exceptions she singled out is inadmis-sibly high. All other things being equal, rather than to say “optional,” it would be wiser for them to admit they do not know what the DOM l- is doing in the corpus.

71 The restorations are the editors’ of TADAE responsibility.


‘I gave you the house which Meshullam son of Zakkur son of Ater, an Aramean of Syene, gave me for its value and about which he wrote a document for me’ (B2.7:2f.).

(43) !µr !nh yhbt lky l-byt! znh ‘Then, I gave you this house’ (B2.7:5).

The DOM l- in exx. (38)–(41) explicitly flags the respective DirObjs, be-cause the Agents and the semantic Objects within each one of the four sen-tences are alike in terms of lexical semantics72 and have the same morpho-logical status value, i. e. in each case the two participants are either ar-throus (Nos. 38 and 39) or anarthrous (No. 40 and probably 41, where zy ‘the one who’ must stand for a definite personal antecedent lost in the pre-ceding context). The reader will remember from 0.1 that the most general raison d’être of DOM is believed to be the desire to set apart (from actual agents) those DirObjs that are agent-like. We have also observed in 0.1 that the rules responsible for the use of DOM are not necessarily hard and fast ones, in certain cases they allow for the speaker’s discretion, so that he may render fine-tuned semantic and pragmatic nuances. On the contrary, there is no easy explanation for the use of the DOM

l- in the document from which examples (42)–(43) stem. This is in par-ticular because a contrasting (i. e., trivially obedient to the RULE) example without l- from the same corpus of contracts is well-known (cf. Folmer 1995:341):

(44) !nh "nny [yh]bt lky byt[!] znh ‘I, Anani, [ga]ve you this hous[e]’ (B3.7:12).

The presence of l- before the DirObj byt! ‘the house’ is the only serious difference in wording between (43) and (44). Yet it turns out that l-byt! occurring twice in B2.7 is not peculiar to the writer of that document, since this kind of usage shows up once more in the contracts from Judah dated to the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt.73 These contracts from Egypt and Judah are separated by almost six centuries (B2.7 was written No-vember 17, 446 B. C.), yet they stand within an uninterrupted tradition of the same legal genre, and this fact may turn out relevant. Consider an example:

72 Consider the made-up English sentence “A donkey mounted a jenny.” Were

it not for the rigid word order, we could tell the doer from the undergoer only due to our knowledge of real life.

73 Folmer 1995:370 adduces one of the relevant examples (now DJD 27:36, No. 8a:3).

46 Articles: Semitic Studies (45) [!nh] zbnt lk ywmh dnh l-byth [dyly] w-drt byt qwrh b-kpr brw

‘[I] sold you today the house [of mine] and the courtyard of the beam(?)-house in GN’ (DJD 27:27, No. 8:2).

Within the above sentence, only one of two coordinated DirObjs is flagged by l-, byth ‘the house,’ but this is probably because l- in this case is a “far-reaching” marker. Note that in the Aramaic contracts from DJD the DOM l- is compati-

ble with other definite DirObj noun phrases denoting sold and bought real estate. We have found one such example:

(46) !nh m-r"wty ywmh dnh zbn[t] lk l-!trh dly dy mtqrh µ[q]l prdsh

‘I, of my own will, on this day have sol[d] you the place of mine that is called the F[iel]d of the Orchard’ (DJD 27:39, No. 9:2f.).

At this juncture, we dare not speculate about possible (genre-specific?) reasons of this usage and shift the discussion to Section 7 (Dead Sea Scrolls Aramaic). Summing up the most important results of 3.1:

1) In Egyptian Aramaic, the DOM l- faithfully signals definite-animate DirObj noun phrases in the singular provided these are headed by count nouns. 2) Collective arthrous DirObjs in the singular (as ‘the troop,’ ‘the do-

mestic staff,’ ‘the humankind’) are not considered animate and therefore do not get l-. 3) Plural arthrous (or otherwise “definite”) DirObj noun phrases that

refer to human beings do not receive the DOM l- in most cases (‘the Egyptians,’ ‘her slaves’). This is because they are perceived as less defi-nite-animate (specific, individuated, salient or whatever we call it) than a singular animate arthrous DirObj (‘the Egyptian,’ ‘her slave’). <To be continued …>


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