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  • From: Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu>
  • To: Vadim Cherny <vadimcherny AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] dot in shin sin
  • Date: Sun, 18 May 2008 23:09:51 -0400

Vadim,

1. I tend to think that the dgeshim [and also possibly the diacritical sin dot] are very ancient markings added to school texts long before the rest of the nikud, and are mostely independent of it. The first dots to be placed were, I think, the word separators. A dot was used as it is the very minimal graphical mark, and was judged not to interfere with the text. Dots placed inside a word for mere scribal purpose, to mark, for instance, the first radical letter, could have turned into what we call today a dagesh, like the one following HA-, WA-, MI-, $E-, or the one in the initial BGDKPT.
Then, more points were added for other purposes and the whole thing got, I think, muddled up, which some people have hard time accepting or admitting.
For example, some grammar textbooks suggest that the dagesh in the letter following the conjoined preposition MI-, 'from', as in the Z of MI-ZOB of Leviticus 15:30, is for complementing the lost N of the full word MIN. But this is curious. Why should a dot be placed, and the text marred, to convey information that is obviously irrelevant and uncertain? At most, it is to the contrary, that the dot (dagesh) was added to caution the hasty pupil of ancient times [who actually rarely directly looked into a book] AGAINST adding an N and reading MIN-ZOB, as he is possibly used to speak. The standard explanation that the point in the letter past HA- is due to it being a shortened HEN-, is awkward as well. In any event, now, by dint of this dot a soft B, K, P becomes, by no fault of its own, hard.
For some reason [because of their remote antiquity?] there is no dot following W-, B-, L-. This causes an initial hard B, K, P to turn soft as it is shifted into second place. The Hebrew Academy in Jerusalem, consisting mostly of purists who consider the dots as sacred as the bare text itself, insists on this softening, and its Hebrew commissar at the Israeli National Broadcasting Service makes sure that they are indeed so pronounced, but the population as a whole [I. F. including] overwhelmingly flouts this rule in daily speech, excepting some biblical idiomatic expressions.
1. One thing is clear, which is that Hebrew has but one shin. It is possible that the sin-shin differences were, as you say, dialectical --- that some shins were pronounced differently, intentionally or unintentionally, out of pure phonetic reasons, or with a semantic purpose in mind. The bottom line is that, even though sin [S'] is universally pronounced now indistinctly of samek, it is still a useful VISUAL discriminator between similarly sounding and semantically affiliated words such as S(AR-AH, 'srorm', S'A(AR-AH, 'hair', and S'(OR-AH, 'barley'. Looking at sin-shin-samek words I fail to see any phonetic exigency for turning a shin or a samek into a sin.
3. As I said before, I think the editor(s) of the HB could not bring himself to write the matriarchal name S'ARAH with a samek, so he resorted to a lame shin.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

On May 17, 2008, at 3:30 PM, Vadim Cherny wrote:

Hello Isaac,

Your letter was missed in my overzealous spam filter, sorry for late reply.
I cannot imagine Hebrew grammarians just introduced an alternative samech out of thin air. Note that the Masoretes always use a dot consistently as some kind of stop. You also have a shibbolet/ sibbolet problem: it is clear than shin/sin is just a phonetic variation. I can see the shin/sin difference clearly from the Russian pronunciation of [sh] which can be both very soft, sin- like, and hard.

Vadim Cherny

Isaac Fried wrote:

Vadim,

It is indeed worthwhile giving the Hebrew dagesh problem a fresh, unbiased and unfettered consideration, free of past dogmatic encumbrances.
It is possible that sin evolved from shin by some dialectical pronunciation differences, but I tend to think it is rather an intentionally introduced visual discriminatory device --- the editor needed an extra letter in the D, Z, T, Y, S, C, $, T group. The name SARAH, for example, with a sin LOOKS good because it calls to mind SAR, 'nobleman', but it obviously looks bad with a samek. Isaiah plays on this in 1:23, saying
שָׂרַיִךְ סוֹרְרִים
" Your princes are rebels ".
Occasionally this interchange is accompanied by an interchange of the filler letters, for example, SB), 'drink to excess', and SB(, 'eat one's fill'.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

On May 8, 2008, at 5:59 AM, Vadim Cherny wrote:

Dear all,

As some of you might remember from the previous discussions on this
list, I advocate the theory that dagesh (both kal and hazak) is a stop.
Specifically, dagesh hazak is a post-tonic geminative stop, and dagesh
kal is interconsonantal stop meant to force syllabification. Both
dageshes are designed to prevent jamming: hazak prevents jamming of the
post-tonic vowel (mitlAb'sh - mitlA.bbesh) and kal prevents jamming of
first consonant in the cluster (ni-zcar - ni-'car, but niz.car).

With that in mind, I'd venture an explanation for shin-sin difference
which I haven't seen before. Dot in shin-sin functions like soft- hard
signs in Russian. A {she} syllable, for example, would be pronounced
with the soft sign like sh[ee]. The point is, shin and sin is the same
letter, the difference being purely environmental.
Sameh, then, is [s] while sin is softened [sh]. It is possible that in
some words with harsh meaning sameh evolved into sin due to hard
pronunciation (e.g., savah with sameh - svah, bars, with sin).

I'd like to welcome your opinions.

Vadim Cherny
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