Biblical Hebrew Forum

["George Athas" <gathas AT hotkey.net.au>]

| Okay, I'm still curious. On what basis do you make this distinction? We use
| the Israeli pronunciation, which doesn't make a distinction; but one of my
| profs thinks it was originally a lateral fricative and explained it as
| positioning the tongue for /l/ and blowing air around it.

Linguistics, phonetic, cognate languages and transliterations from other 
languages. Although I
think a completely accurate rendition of the phonemes is beyond us, I think 
we can come pretty
close.

Yes, I do think that sin was pronounced as lateral fricative in some regions 
-- I'm fairly sure
that the Shibboleth incident in Judges has the lateral fricative behind it. 
If I remember
correctly, the sin as lateral fricative was figured out by an Akkadian 
transliteration of some
Hebrew, where the verb ($H (to do/make) was transliterated as HALTA.

Best regards,

GEORGE ATHAS
(Sydney, Australia)