Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Henry Churchyard" <churchh AT usa.net>]

Ullendorf is of course correct in his assertion that only a restricted
vocabulary of Biblical Hebrew has come down to us, but this has almost
nothing whatever to do with the hypothesis that Biblical Hebrew
"didn't yet exist" in the 1st. half of the 1st millennium B.C.  This
latter hypothesis is meaningless in one sense, since (unless it is
claimed that Biblical Hebrew is some kind of made-up Esperanto) there
must be an ancestor of Biblical Hebrew existing at every chronological
period from attested Biblical Hebrew back to proto-Semitic.  If it's
claimed that there is nothing in Biblical Hebrew which is incompatible
with mid-1st.-millennium B.C.E Phoenician, then I don't think this is
entirely true either; a number of innovations occurred in Phoenician
which did not occur in Hebrew, as you can see by looking up Harris's
Zellig S. Harris's book _Development of the Canaanite Dialects: An
Investigation in Linguistic History (American Oriental Series, Volume
16)_, including a change of the root _h-l-k_ to _y-l-k_ in Phoenician
(I seem to remember), raising of Canaanite long _o_ to _u_, etc. etc.

Of course, Hebrew and Phoenician (along with Moabite, Ammonite,
northern Hebrew etc.) were members of a "dialect continuum" -- a
sequence of fairly closely related languages spoken in adjacent
regions, through which "waves" of innovations and linguistic
influences can pass back and forth (note that Phoenician and Judean
Hebrew were not actually geographically adjacent in the
dialect-chain).

The effects of such a persisting dialect continuum (along with Sapir's
mysterious "drift") can make related languages seem more similar than
one would expect, if the only information you were given was the time
at which they originally diverged -- and therefore can also make it
extremely difficult to estimate the original time of divergence by
means of comparing the overall similarity between the attested
languages.  So it seems to me that blanket statements that Hebrew was
just Phoenician until 400 B.C., or whatever, are rather more
categorical and dogmatic than can be justified by the available facts
and evidence, and are also contridicted to some degree by the
evidence.

--
Henry Churchyard   churchh AT usa.net   http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/