Tiberian Hebrew phonology By Joseph L. Malone (review)

BOOK NOTICES 611 Tiberian Hebrew phonology. By Joseph L. Malone. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1993. Pp. x, 204. Cloth $45.00. One of the most eagerly awaited publications in Semitic linguistics, this oversize volume, some 25 years in the making, is an attempt at a complete phonological description of a sizable corpus, the Hebrew Bible, in strictly orthodox SPE terms, fully exploiting all the notational conventions (including some that were decried as artificial—cheating—by early critics). Malone does not reject subsequent evolutions of phonological theory, notably those of Alan Prince and John McCarthy, even pointing to phenomena that metrical and lexical approaches could handle more efficiently; but he continues to dialog with them from the viewpoint of one who knows the material thoroughly (rather than copying a handful of standard examples from theory to theory). The heart of the book is 19 'Morphological rules', 8 'Persistent phonological rules', and 43 Transient phonological rules', many laden with conditions of several kinds, presented alphabetically in Chs. 7, 8, and 9, respectively (43-102); each chapter ends with a discussion of the ordering of the rules. The output of the rules is a 'phonetic interpretation [that] largely follows the classical rules of Bauer and Leander (1922) and Brockelmann [(1908-13)]' (6) and, surprisingly , allows accented short vowels in open syllables . The only explicit defense of the interpretation is the reprinting of an important 1980 underground article, 'Messrs McCarthy and Prince, and the problem of Hebrew vowel color' (151-55), which shows via modern argumentation that the traditional 7-color interpretation of the vowel notation of Bible manuscripts is correct, rather than the 5-color view currently found in school grammars (and lent unfortunate legitimacy by the style sheet of the Society of Biblical Literature). Also admitted are five 'colorings ' of orthographic schwa, written as a, á, 3, i. and ü (the last two not discussed anywhere). These apparently 'fall out' (to use an unfortunate current locution) of the theory but are not explicitly part of the grammatical tradition. The input to the rules is the 'Underlying system' (showing verbs only, though the corpus includes the other word classes as well) presented in Ch. 3 (16-27). This system seems to be devised strictly to make the rules come out right; unlike the conservative-orthography-based system of SPE, the forms are not historical (i.e. based in Comparative Northwest Semitic), as is apparent simply from the admission of vowels e and o to the underlying forms. The book has several morals. For one, the Hebrew Bible is not a homogeneous corpus. Notes on anomalous forms abound, as do queries and question marks; the Bible as we have it preserves many of the idiosyncrasies of the temporal and regional dialects of its centuries of authors, as well as many seeming slips of the pen that have been kept because the text is hallowed . M belongs to a school of interpreters who do not emend away the difficulties. Again, generative phonology can be a thrilling intellectual puzzle. This study has absorbed the author for virtually his entire career, and it does not pretend to be definitive. I do not for a moment believe that something like these 70 rules literally operated in the heads of the redactors of the Bible text: theirjob was to produce uniformity from the inherited disparities. A much more elegant generative phonology may be found in M's 'Modern and Classical Mandaic phonology ', to appear in a volume ofAsian and African phonologies edited by Alan S. Kaye. Mandaic is an Aramaic (also Northwest Semitic) language with the advantage of full descriptions of both the literary and the vernacular forms, in which the underlying systematicity can be verified. Tiberian Hebrew phonology is friendlier to the nonphonological Hebraist than to the nonHebraist phonologist—a glossary (193-98), largely composed by M. O'Connor, defines many ofthe linguistic terms, but not many ofthe philological terms. There are many misprints in the Hebrew orthography, but they are rendered harmless by the remarkable redundancy built in: the major mode ofpresentation is phonetic transcription , and Ch. 12, 'Inventory of forms', includes a corpus (162-91) of 438 examples with orthography (including the accents or cantillation marks, given for...