[b-hebrew] Alphabet (WAS: chalal)
Isaac Fried
if at math.bu.edu
Sat Sep 8 20:33:35 EDT 2007
Yigal,
Absolutly not. It never occurred to me to make this silly claim that
"the alphabet that we use now for Hebrew was the "original" one". I
was just making the obvious observation that the interchanging
letters gimmel, he, xet, kaf, qof, look in our present script, in
which the Torah is written, nearly identical [many people raise the
complaint that most Hebrew letters look the same to them, and you
know how many scribal errors are due this similarity]. If this
similarity is deliberate or accidental I don't know. I suspect it is
deliberate. In any event, this has no bearing on my claim on the
composition of the Hebrew root. I also never asserted "that these
similarities are a part of the basic, most ancient structure of the
Hebrew language". Never.
I don't know how old our script is. The common claim that it was
introduced by Ezra on the first return to Zion, in order to effect a
clean cut with the Samaritans is plausible, but who knows.
Of course, our square script did not come from nowhere, I see
similarities between it and that of the ancient Canaanites, but this
may be an illusion. In any event, even if our square script is a
direct descendent of the Canaanite script it underwent a good deal of
premeditated stylizing until reaching us in its present form.
Isaac Fried, Boston University
On Sep 8, 2007, at 5:18 PM, Yigal Levin wrote:
> Isaac, are you really saying that you think that the alphabet that
> we use
> now for Hebrew was the "original" one? Any basic book on ancient
> Western-Semitic paleography will tell you that the alphabet first
> used by
> the Hebrews was what we today call the "Paleo-Hebrew" or "Phoenician"
> alphabet. Without getting into the debate about who invented it,
> this was
> the alphabet used by Israelites, Phoenicians, Moabites, Ammonites,
> Edomites
> and Arameans during the Iron Age (what for Judah was the pre-exilic
> period),
> with each group slowly developing it's own distinctive style or
> "font".
> Eventually, the style used by Aramean scribes (now employed by their
> Assyrian, Babylonian and then Persian masters) changed more radically,
> becoming the block letters that we know today. As Jews, both in
> Babylonia
> and in Judah, became more familiar with Aramaic which had become
> the common
> language of the whole region, they slowly adopted this common
> letter-form,
> at first for Aramaic and "secular" documents, eventually for sacred
> texts as
> well. The Rabbis of the Talmud, looking back at this proccess from
> several
> hundered years later, claimed that the change had been authorized
> by Ezra.
> The evidence that we have now shows that it was much more gradual.
> But in
> any case, the bottom line is that the similarities between letters
> that are
> part of your theory work in the more recent script, but not in the
> older
> one. So your claim that these similarities are a part of the basic,
> most
> ancient structure of the Hebrew language does not hold.
>
>
> Yigal Levin
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Isaac Fried" <if at math.bu.edu>
> To: "Yigal Levin" <leviny1 at mail.biu.ac.il>
> Cc: "b-hebrew" <b-hebrew at lists.ibiblio.org>
> Sent: Friday, September 07, 2007 12:08 PM
> Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] chalal - perforate/pierce?/KRH
>
>
>> Yigal,
>>
>> You are right. I would not play such games with the Phoenicians; with
>> them I would limit myself to shesh-besh. Do you think it is a mere
>> accident of nature that the square Hebrew letters he and xet are
>> nearly
>> identical?
>>
>> Isaac Fried, Boston University
>>
>
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