Aspects of the Ventivie in Amarna Canaanite

Ambjörn Sjörs
Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Uppsala, Sweden

Thursday, February 22, 2018
5:00 PM
Breasted Hall of the Oriental Institute

The corpus of Amarna Canaanite letters from Byblos contains a number of verb forms that end in -a(m) and in -n(n)a. It will be shown that these endings are allomorphs and used for the ventive, i.e. to indicate motion twoards the speaker. It will also be shown that the ventive when added to a verb form in the 1st person, in which the goal of the action coincides with the speaker-subject, results in a reflexive-benefactive meaning, which anticipates the functions of the cohortative in Biblical Hebrew.