Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Henry Churchyard <churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>]

I went to the university library near where I'm visiting, and found
the Blau article on the survival of `ayin vs. ghayin and h.et vs. khet
in Hebrew, as reflected in Septuagint transliterations of proper
names:

Joshua Blau, "On Polyphony in Biblical Hebrew", Proceedings of the
Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Volume 6 No. 2 (1982,
Jerusalem).

This is a separately published item (in English, by the way), rather
than a book article as I had remembered (I was confusing its
publication details with those of Blau's 1980 article on "The Parallel
Development of the Feminine Ending -at in the Semitic Languages" in
_Hebrew Union College Annual_), so it will have a listing in standard
library catalogues.

The basic conclusion is that Proto-Semitic [`],[gh] and [h.],[kh] did
indeed remain distinct in Hebrew until the beginning of the
translation of Hebrew Bible in Greek (i.e. when the Pentateuch was
translated).  But the two had merged by the time the Greek versions of
Ezra and Nehemiah in the Septuagint were produced.  In the case of
[gh] (which apparently merged a little quicker than [kh] did), there
is even a difference between Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch.

Blau doesn't assign any absolute dates, but I assume this roughly
means that [gh] and [kh] pretty much disappeared during the course of
the second and/or third centuries B.C.E.

--
Henry Churchyard churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu  
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~churchh