Biblical Hebrew Forum

[peter_kirk AT sil.org]

Dear Ian,

Thank you for your reply. To save everyone's bandwidth, I will avoid 
(unlike some others) copying back to you all your own text, but stick 
to the relevant part.

You wrote: "If we are dealing with texts from both periods, why can't 
one generalise over the time between them?" Precisely because you 
don't know what happened in between. Suppose you had documents in 
English from Edward the Confessor and documents in English from 
Richard II, but nothing in between. By your method, you would assume 
that English was used for the whole of the intervening period. But it 
wasn't. Similarly, if the language situation in Maccabean and late 
Roman times was similar, it doesn't mean that the time in between was 
uniform.

Peter KIrk