[b-hebrew] Transliterating from Hebrew to Greek
Isaac Fried
if at math.bu.edu
Mon Jan 18 10:52:36 EST 2010
There could be more to it than just not hearing right:
גן אדן = the garden of the lord אדון
גן אדם = the garden of man אדם
Isaac Fried, Boston University
On Jan 18, 2010, at 10:00 AM, James Christian wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> recent discussions have led me to take a closer look at
> transliteration
> patterns from Hebrew to Greek. I share my preliminary observations
> below:
>
>> From Genesis 2:8 we see Eden in MT as עֵדֶן however, in Greek
>> we see Eδεμ
> (edem) thus highlighting two features.
>
> 1) Ayin has no correspondent in the Greek and so it moves straight
> on to the
> following vowel.
> 2) A confusion between the similarly pronounced phones of n and m.
>
> In Genesis 2:11 we see the river Pishon in MT as פִּישׁוֹן
> while in Greek φισων
> thus highlighting other interesting features:
>
> 1) A confusion between aspirate p and unaspirated p (Greek uses phi).
> 2) We see Greek omega (long o) stading in the place of holem waw as
> we would
> ordinarily expect
>
> In Genesis 2:13 we see the river Gishon in MT as גִּיחוֹן
> while in Greek we
> see γηων thus highlighting more interesting features:
>
> 1) Despite Greek having a letter chi kh sound is completely
> omitted. We only
> see its trace in the middle of an unusual combination of Greek
> vowels ηω
> 2) Long /i:/ vowel transliterated with η
> 3) Again Greek omega stands for holem waw as we would expect (we
> haven't
> gone far into the Torah but we are already starting to notice a
> consistent
> pattern here)
>
> We see in MT אָדָם but in LXX we see Aδαμ again highlighting
> an already seen
> feature:
>
> 1) Impossible to represent consonant aleph is dropped from
> transliteration
> and its following vowel is the first letter we see (i.e. alpha)
>
> In general, we see that problem consonants are omitted and their
> nearest
> vowels are used instead. This pattern is considerably evident and well
> testified for the Hebrew holem waw combination which is consistently
> transliterated with Greek Omega (if there are counter examples I
> would be
> delighted to see them).
>
> James Christian
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