Philippi's law refers to a sound rule in Biblical Hebrew first identified by F.W.M. Philippi in 1878, but has since been refined by Thomas O. Lambdin. Essentially, in Biblical Hebrew, sometimes the sound for ''i'' shifted to ''a'', but the reason for this development was unclear or debated. It is "universally supposed to be operative", according to linguists in the field, but criticized as "Philippi's law falls woefully short of what one would expect of a 'law' in historical phonology...." Some critics suggested that it might not even be a rule in Hebrew, but rather a sound rule in

Aramaic The Aramaic languages, short Aramaic ( syc, ܐܪܡܝܐ, Arāmāyā; oar, 𐤀𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤀; arc, 𐡀𐡓𐡌𐡉𐡀; tmr, אֲרָמִית), are a language family containing many varieties (languages and dialects) that originated in ...

. Even Philippi, who mentions it in an article about the numeral '2' in Semitic, proposed that "the rule was

Proto-Semitic Proto-Semitic is the hypothetical reconstructed proto-language ancestral to the Semitic languages. There is no consensus regarding the location of the Proto-Semitic '' Urheimat''; scholars hypothesize that it may have originated in the Levant ( ...

" in origin. Philippi's law is also used to explain the vowel shift of

''bint'' for daughter to the Hebrew word ''bat'' (בת) and many other words.Paul Joüon (Translated by T. Muraoka). A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew: ''Subsidia Biblica''. Gregorian Biblical BookShop, 2006. . Pages 88, 90, 117, 138, 147, 223, 279, 293 (n. 1).

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Hebrew language {{Hebrew-lang-stub

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