Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT sil.org]

Thank you. I would be interested in reading such an article, but I 
guess it's in m-hebrew, and anyway not available to me, at home but 
far from good libraries.

This raises the question of what do we mean by the pronunication of 
b-hebrew. If what Blau says is correct, the pronunciation of the 
original writers may have made this distinction. Now maybe for 
practical purposes we are forced to follow either the Masoretic 
pronunciation or a widely accepted modern pronunciation. But it does 
show that those who declare that `ayin and Het are pharyngeal and not 
uvular (or glottal) need to define their terms more carefully: in 
post-Biblical, Masoretic and certain modern pronunciations `ayin and 
Het are so pronounced.

Peter Kirk


______________________________ Reply Separator 
_________________________________
Subject: Re: ayin
Author:  churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu at internet
Date:    02/01/1999 11:59


> From: Peter_Kirk AT sil.org

> So what about the theory that there were two distinct pronunciations 
> of `ayin and two of Het in ancient Hebrew?  Evidence for this in
> Hebrew includes the transliteration of `ayin as gamma in LXX (and
> "g" in English) in the names Gaza and Gomorrah - Gaza is spelt with 
> gheyn in Arabic. Thus `ayin and ghayin, Het and khet would, like sin 
> and shin, have been two letters written the same.  Is there anything 
> in that theory?

There was a paper by Joshua Blau published in 1980 in the proceedings 
of the Israeli academy of something that addressed this question (I'm 
away from home now, and so don't have the exact reference handy).  The 
general conclusion was that such a distinction could well have 
persisted into Hellenistic times, but not all that much later (I don't 
remember exact chronology offhand).

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