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

50 Pages·2013·0.41 MB·English

by  Baggy Trousers

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.
M. Kalinin, S. Loesov, Encoding of the Direct Object … 5

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 epēšum , e. g.
inf.

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 waǧh-an ‘pretty-faced ’.
ACC
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 Š 77).
3
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.
M. Kalinin, S. Loesov, Encoding of the Direct Object … 7

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).
M. Kalinin, S. Loesov, Encoding of the Direct Object … 9

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> you do not come with your army and [you do not]
sg.
come with your armies to strengthen my house, [and if
pl.
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 (!šr), with ref. to previous literature.
5
17 DNWSI 715.