The Antepenult Stressing of Old Hebrew and Its Influence on the Shaping of the Vowels

Abstract

Since most of the Hebrew words and word forms as we know them from the Massoretic text of the Old Testament are stressed on the last syllable, it is the common opinion, to be found both in Hebrew and in comparative grammars, that, before the loss of its short endings and other final vowels, Hebrew like Aramaic, with which it is frequently taken together as Northwest Semitic, was characterized by penult stressing. For instance, according to Brockelmann, Vergleichende Grammatik der semitischen Sprachen, page 36, the third person masculine forms of the qal were originally qatadla and qatdlIt, the former developing to the historical qdtdl simply by dropping its final a, while qatdl became qatel by an assimilation of its stress to that of the singular qdtadl. Of the improbability of this theory and its complete uselessness for the explanation of the Hebrew vocalization system I became aware when I made my first acquaintance with Hebrew in the "Obersekunda" of the Gymnasium of my home town, Eisenach, and it was at that time, i.e., in 1897, more than forty years ago and eleven years before the publication of Brockelmann's Vergleichende Grammatik, that I also discovered that the seemingly complicated and most confusing vocalization of Hebrew finds an astonishingly simple solution by the assumption of a regular antepenult stressing in Old Hebrew, or, vice