JA-SA-MU
'He hears'—yaqtal hypocoristic personal name with frozen nominative -ū
- Reading
- yaśmaʿū
- Confidence
- Candidate
- Root
- *šVmaʕ- ‘hear’
- Kind
- Personal name
- Language
- Semitic
- Rank
- Amorite-linked appendix
Compared forms
- Hebrewיִשְׁמָעֵאל (Yišmāʿēl / Ishmael) = "El hears"—√š-m-ʿ + ʾēl; שִׁמְעוֹן (Šimʿōn / Simeon) = "hearing"; שְׁמוּאֵל (Šəmūʾēl / Samuel) = "name/heard of El"
- Ugariticyšmʿ—theophoric PN element in KTU personal names; šmʿ "to hear" in Ba’al cycle
- Akkadianšemûšemû "to hear"; Šamû-Adda (EA 325) = "Addu has heard"—same root reversed
- Punic√š-m-ʿ in ŠMʿ-BʿL "Baal has heard" (Benz 1972); one of the productive PN roots in Carthaginian epigraphy
- Arabicsamiʿasamiʿa "to hear"; Ismāʿīl (Ishmael)
- AmoriteYa-ás-ma-ḫu-um, Yasmaḫ-Addu (Mari, APNM p. 132)
Attestations1 cited
- ZA 15aJA-SA-MU 5
Commentary
ZA 15a, a Zakros wine allocation list: JA-SA-MU 5, beside SI-PI-KI and SA-MI-DA-E. yaśmaʿū ‘he hears’, √š-m-ʿ, the bare verbal element of a sentence name, as Yišmāʿēl ‘El hears’ without the god; SA writes s and š alike, and the final ʿ is unwritten. Cuneiform writes the guttural (Ya-ás-ma-aḫ-{d}IM) and Linear A drops it: JA-SA-MU is the Linear A shape of the Yašmaʿ hypocoristicon, Ya-ás-ma-ḫu-u[m] (Huffmon 1965, 132). The form is the yaqtal theme-vowel class with the frozen nominative -ū, the citation form of an independent name (Huffmon 1965, 104–15); the yaqtul yašmuʿ is the rival parse, both G imperfects with one Linear A surface. Rivals: yasamu with sāmek; Ya-ʾAšmu, an Eshmun short form, though the short forms of ʾŠMN write ʾŠM-, not *YŠM-. One attestation.