Canaanite shift
In historical linguistics, the Canaanite shift is a vowel shift/sound change that took place in the Canaanite dialects, which belong to the Northwest Semitic branch of the Semitic languages family. This sound change caused Proto-NW-Semitic *ā to turn into ō in Proto-Canaanite. It accounts, for example, for the difference between the second vowel of Hebrew שלום and its Arabic cognate سلام. The original word was probably *šalām-, with the ā preserved in Arabic, but transformed into ō in Hebrew. The change is attested in records from the Amarna Period, dating it to the mid-2nd millennium BCE.
Conditioning
This vowel shift is well attested in Hebrew and other Canaanite languages, but its exact nature has historically been contested.Brockelmann held that the Canaanite Shift only affected stressed vowels, formulating the shift as *ā́ > *ṓ.
Bauer and Leander treat the cases of apparently preserved *ā as evidence for their theory of Hebrew as a mixed language.
Birkeland discounted some of Brockelmann’s most important counterexamples of the Canaanite Shift. Based on irregular correspondences and evidence from Arabic and Phoenician spellings, he explains II-wy and III-wy perfect forms like קָם and גָּלָה as relatively late contractions from triradical forms like *qawama and *galawa, which postdate the operation of the Canaanite Shift. Word-final cases of -å, in Birkeland’s view, are late restitutions, resulting from dialect borrowing. Having thus eliminated most of the counterexamples that motivated the proponents of stress conditioning, he posits an unconditioned shift of *ā > *ō.
Suchard found that the Canaanite Shift was absent from words where *ā was preceded by *u or *w in the preceding syllable. He explained the handful of words where the Canaanite Shift occurred despite *u in the preceding syllable as a product of dissimilation of *u to *i when *u was adjacent to a bilabial consonant, a separate sound change known as Suchard's Law.
Arabic–Hebrew parallels
The shift was so productive in Canaanite languages that it altered their inflectional and derivational morphologies wherever they contained the reflex of a pre-Canaanite *ā, as can be seen in Hebrew, the most attested of Canaanite languages, by comparing it with Arabic, a well-attested non-Canaanite Semitic language.Present participle of ''Qal'' verbs
فاعل vs. Tiberian Hebrew פועל ''''Feminine plural
ات- vs. Tiberian Hebrew ות- ''''Noun
فعال ' vs. Tiberian Hebrew פעול 'Classical Arabic فأل vs. Tiberian Hebrew פול, פאל ''''
Other words
In one of the above lexical items, the shift did not only affect originally long vowels, but also originally short vowels occurring in the vicinity of a historically attested glottal stop in Canaanite.Transcriptions of the Phoenician language reveal that the change also took place there – see suffete.