The Middle Assyrian period (ca. 1500–1000 BCE) is characterized by the transformation of the former city state of Ashur into an expansive empire. Over the last couple of decennia, the text corpus has grown considerably due to many archaeological excavations of archives in Syria. This grammatical description of Middle Assyrian seeks to improve our knowledge of the language of these texts. It takes into account recently published texts, including the archives from Tell Aš-ŠēH Hamad, Tell Huwira, Tell Sabi Abyad and Tell Taban. The result serves as a long overdue supplementation to Mayer’s Untersuchungen zur Grammatik des Mittelassyrischen (1971). The monograph consists of an introduction to the corpus and its historical context, followed by discussions on orthography, phonology, morphology and syntax. Non-Assyrian influences on orthography and grammar are also subject of discussion. In addition, comparisons are made between the different stages of the Assyrian language in order to put Middle Assyrian into context of its intermediate stage between Old Assyrian (ca. 1900–1700) and Neo-Assyrian (ca. 1000–600). Thus, the monograph is aimed at Assyriologists as well as Semitists.
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In historical linguistics, the prevailing view is that sound change is phonetically regular: within one language variety, the same sound in the same phonetic environment always undergoes the same sound changes, regardless of other factors like word meaning or part of speech. Many of the sound changes previously identified for Biblical Hebrew, however, seem to operate irregularly or only affect certain categories of words. Earlier attempts to make sense of these processes are either hindered by outdated assumptions about the nature of Hebrew, rely on implausible appeals to analogy, or offer explanations that are contradicted by other Hebrew data. This dissertation takes a fresh, holistic look at the sound changes affecting the vowels of Biblical Hebrew, starting from the reconstructed Proto-Northwest-Semitic stage. The sound changes investigated include the Canaanite Shift (*ā > *ō), the contraction of diphthongs and triphthongs, (pre-)tonic and pausal lengthening, changes of *i > *a and *a > *i, and the loss of word-final vowels. Additionally, the interaction of these sound laws with various morphological changes is examined in a concise historical morphology of Biblical Hebrew. The conclusion is that purely phonetic conditions can indeed be established for practically all sound changes affecting the Biblical Hebrew vowels.
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