Philippi's law refers to a sound rule in

Biblical Hebrew Biblical Hebrew ( or ), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanite languages, Canaanitic branch of the Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Isra ...

first identified by F. W. M. Philippi in 1878, but has since been refined by Thomas O. Lambdin. Essentially, in Biblical Hebrew, sometimes the sound shifted to , but the reason for this development was unclear or debated. It is "universally supposed to be operative", according to linguists in the field, but criticized as "Philippi's law falls woefully short of what one would expect of a 'law' in historical phonology...." Some critics suggested that it might not even be a rule in Hebrew, but rather a sound rule in

Aramaic Aramaic (; ) is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Sinai, southeastern Anatolia, and Eastern Arabia, where it has been continually written a ...

. Even Philippi, who mentions it in an article about the numeral '2' in Semitic, proposed that "the rule was

Proto-Semitic Proto-Semitic is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Semitic languages. There is no consensus regarding the location of the linguistic homeland for Proto-Semitic: scholars hypothesize that it may have originated in the Levant, the Sahara, ...

" in origin. Philippi's law is also used to explain the vowel shift of

''bint'' for daughter to the Hebrew word ''bat'' (בת) and many other words.Paul Joüon (Translated by T. Muraoka). A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew: ''Subsidia Biblica''. Gregorian Biblical BookShop, 2006. . Pages 88, 90, 117, 138, 147, 223, 279, 293 (n. 1).

References

Hebrew language {{Hebrew-lang-stub

See also

References