# JA-SA-MU (yaśmaʿū)

> 'He hears'—yaqtal hypocoristic personal name with frozen nominative -ū

A Linear A word in the Linear A Lexicon. The reading is a proposal and carries its tier.

- Reading: yaśmaʿū
- Confidence: Candidate. A comparison worth testing; the evidence is thin or the word is rare.
- Root: [\*šVmaʕ-](<https://linear-a.ai/roots/216/index.md>) 'hear'
- Kind: Personal name
- Language: Semitic
- Signs: JA (ja) · SA (sa) · MU (mu)
- Rank: Amorite-linked appendix

## Compared forms

- Hebrew: יִשְׁמָעֵאל (Yišmāʿēl / Ishmael) = "El hears"—√š-m-ʿ + ʾēl; שִׁמְעוֹן (Šimʿōn / Simeon) = "hearing"; שְׁמוּאֵל (Šəmūʾēl / Samuel) = "name/heard of El"
- Ugaritic: yšmʿ—theophoric PN element in KTU personal names; šmʿ "to hear" in Ba'al cycle
- Akkadian: *šemû* — šemû "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
- Arabic: *samiʿa* — samiʿa "to hear"; Ismāʿīl (Ishmael)
- Amorite: Ya-ás-ma-ḫu-um, Yasmaḫ-Addu (Mari, APNM p. 132)

## Attestations

- [ZA 15a](<https://linear-a.ai/texts/ZA15a/index.md>): JA-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.

## In the onomasticon

- [JA-SA-MU](<https://linear-a.ai/names/JA-SA-MU/index.md>): Personal name, Semitic

## References

- Reading: di Mino
- KTU: Dietrich, Manfried; Loretz, Oswald; Sanmartín, Joaquín (2013), Die keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani und anderen Orten / The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places (KTU³). Ugarit-Verlag, Münster (Alter Orient und Altes Testament 360/1); ISBN 978-3-86835-014-2
- EA: Moran, William L. (1992), The Amarna Letters. Johns Hopkins University Press
- APNM: Huffmon, Herbert B. (1965), Amorite Personal Names in the Mari Texts: A Structural and Lexical Study. The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore
- Benz, Frank L. (1972), Personal Names in the Phoenician and Punic Inscriptions. Studia Pohl 8,Biblical Institute Press

---

Page: https://linear-a.ai/lexicon/JA-SA-MU/
Licence: CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Cite as: di Mino, Tom. 2026. Linear A Lexicon. Plasma AI. https://linear-a.ai/. Data: kaphtor, commit 50525edd.