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  • From: James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk>
  • To: Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Dagesh - a different sound or aspiration?
  • Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:27:22 +0100

Thanks for that. That was an interesting post. I think you are right in many respects. Aramaic speakers can still be found today in small pocket society's in Iraq. They, to this day, resist the Islamic faith and it is perhaps their language which has helped them exclude themselves from the ethnic majority in the country in which they reside almost as alien residents.

Their culture is an interesting one with many parallels the kind of impression we get about John the Baptist and his pre-Christian following. See this wiki article about the mandaeans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandaeism

I think their culture may be an interesting case study in this kind of debate.

James Christian

Quoting Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>:

I've tried to stay out of this but I can't resist any longer.

Basically, these are the simple linguistic facts of the matter:

1) We know Hebrew mainly through Greek

maybe for you, it depends 'what you mean "we"?' to quote the famous
Tonto and Lone Ranger joke.
Otherwise not true, not for the Second Temple Hebrew speakers,
Qumranians, mishnaic speakers, geonim and piyyutim, and finally
the medieval Hebrew grammarians.

2) We know Greek mainly through Latin

Again, maybe for you.
Not true, for the Greeks themselves who have a three-thousand
year partially documented, continuous history, tons of papyri
and inscriptions, and even ancient grammarians who said things
like BOAI ('we don't pronounce the iota').

3) We know Latin mainly through our translations from Latin

I'm not sure the Vatican would agree.

4) When we transliterated Hebrew names from Latin the limitations of
the naturally sounding sequences of phonemes and of our alphabet
caused us to lose/change features of the latin vocalisation

Irrelevant.
This is not what was operating within Hebrew itself, or
within any of the languages themselves, and each language must
be interpreted internally in a linguistically consistent manner, while
at the same time being compared to contact languages that are
themselves being interpreted internally in a linguistically consistent
manner.
. . .

Several Semitic languages have been in continual use for three millenia
namely Hebrew, Aramaic, and presumably Arabic. (Arabic did not appear
"out of nothing" during the Second Temple period, and from its structure
it is clear that it branched off from "Western Semitic" BEFORE the split
between Canaanite-Hebrew and Aramaic. (Hebrew and Aramaic are
much tighter dialectically, which attests that their mother remained together
in a proto-Western Semitic longer than Arabic's mother. And of course, one
must also distinguish between borrowings and genetic relationship.
Both occur.)

For some 'hard data', consider that the begedkefet phenomena entered
the Aramaic language between the time of the ZKR inscription and
Jeremiah.
for this to be "hard" data one must understand phonological systems
and their development.
And one must recognize underdifferentiated alphabets,
where a language community (Aramaic) borrows an alphabet (Phoenician
Canaanite) that does not fit exactly. Aramaic still had the proto-Semitic
interdental (probably fricative) phonemes in its system and it chose to
write yathub 'he will return' with a "shin", not a bad choice since it is
close in the mouth and fricative. "yatub" was apparently rejected as
being too hard. The 'why' of their choice is irrelevant. Ditto for
writing dhahab 'gold' as z.h.b. What matters is that
by the time of Jeremiah a systematic change took place and 'he will
return' and other words of that sound patten started getting written
with 't', and the 'dhahab' "gold" words starting getting written with 'd'.
This can best be explained as evidence of the fricative begedkefet system
entering the language. The "th" of yashub starting sounding like any
old intervocalic 't', so it was re-interpreted as a 't' and thereafter written
yatub" (now pronounced yathuv).

It is also a reasonable deduction from the above that the begedkefet
phenomenon was not an original feature of Phoenician alphabet.
Begedkefet were originally all 'hard'.

Now the above does not answer many little questions about transitions
throughout the above languages, but at least it puts a historical perspective
on the existence of 'begedkefet' in antiquity in a closely related language
written without dots and over a millenium before
people started writing little dots in texts to add precision to the text of a
closely related language (Hebrew).

I've tried to stay out of this but I can't resist any longer.

`atta uxal le-exol aruHat ha-boqer be-shalva.

Randall Buth

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Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth AT gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
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