Proto-Austronesian Hebrew/Phonology

Like all the languages fanning out from Taiwan 3000 years ago, an intense flattening of the phonemic landscape slowly decimated PAH. By the time of they were living on Palau, a wide array of simplifications had taken place. Almost all the changes parallel the development of Proto-Austronesian (PAn) > Proto-Malayo-Polynesian (PMP).

History

Paleo-Hebrew

PH Levantine Vowels
	Front	Near-front	Central	Back
High	i iː			u uː
High-mid		e		o oː
Near-low			a aː

PH Levantine Consonants
		Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Post-A.	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Pharyngeal	Glottal
Nasal		m		n
Stop	unvoiced	p		t			k			?
	voiced	b		d			g
	ejective			t'			k'
Fricative	unvoiced	f	θ	s	ʃ		x	χ	ħ	h
	voiced	v	ð	z			ɤ	ʁ	ʕ
	ejective			s'
	lateral				ɬ
Approximants		w		l		j
Trill				r

Before being carried off, the Ancient Hebrews of Canaan had a robust and diverse phonology, with nine places and ten manners of articulation. Tiberian Hebrew orthography utilizes 22 consonants with three diacritical marks (the dageš, sin-dot, and šin-dot) to notate 31 sounds, though it is a very recent rediscovery that two letters were homographs.. It is highly unlikely that the begadkefat letters had two sounds until well after 800 B.C.

It also seems reasonable to assume that PH had not yet developed the schwa (or other reduced vowels) before leaving the ANE. /e/ would and did function as the epenthetic vowel of choice, before pre and post transport.

Sounds changes

The amalgamated Semitic people who found themselves slaves in Southeast Asia had a phonology that largely overlapped with the surrounding PAn language(s). The sounds which were uniquely Afro-Asiatic seemed to have dropped off very quickly. The fricative “versions” of the stops (which had always been allophone) fell away almost immediately, , as did the “emphatic” versions (i.e. /k’/ became /k/ and /t’/ became /t/). PH *ɬ > PAH *ŋ. The addition of the velar nasal may seem strange, especially in the syllable onset, but is entirely predictable given the new surroundings in Southeast Asia and Oceania. The alveolar fricative ejective (Tiberian צ/ṣaḏé) may well have become the alveolar affricative before leaving the Levant. The Phoenician Helenization of ‘ayin into /a/ also seems to have happened before the exodus. Semitologist suppose an allophony between gimel without dageš (ג, the voiced velar fricative) and ḥeṯ (the voiceless pharyngeal fricative) to explain the later becoming the voiced velar stop. The lateral approximant and the alveolar trill both became the alveolar tap (though some suppose this to be an artifact of Fujisaka’s).

Word-initial or Word-medial consonant changes

• PH * k,x,k’ > PAH *k
• PH * g,ɤ,χ,ʁ > PAH *g
• PH * t,θ,t’ > PAH *t
• PH * f,p > PAH *p
• PH * v,b > PAH *b
• PH * d,ð > PAH *d
• PH * ʃ,ɬ > PAH *ŋ
• PH * m > PAH *m
• PH * n > PAH *n
• PH * ʕ > PAH *a
• PH * s’ > PAH *ts

Word-final consonant changes

• PH *k,x,k’,h,p,f > PAH *h
• PH *g,ɤ,ʃ,ɬ,χ,ʁ > PAH *ŋ
• PH *? > compensatory lengthening
• PH *t,θ,t’,s,s’,z > s
• PH *d,ð > n
• PH *v,b > m
• PH *ʕ > PAH *o
• PH *ħ > PAH*a
• PH *r,l > PAH*r
• PH *z > PAH*z
• PH *w > PAH*w
• PH *j > PAH*j
• PH *ʔ > PAH*ʔ
• PH *h > PAH*h
• PH *s > PAH*s
• PH *ħ > a
• PH *w > u
• PH *j > i
• PH *l > lengthen previous vowel
• PH *r > reduplicate previous syllable
• PH *word final nasal > loses place of articula- tion