Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk" <peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com>]

Shai, thank you for your interesting exposition of this subject, which
fascinates me.

One point that worries me is that you are talking of aspirated voiced
plosives. The normal mechanism for aspiration is anatomically relevant only
to voiceless plosives. There are so-called aspirated voiced plosives, but
their production mechanism is very different and they are
cross-linguistically very rare, being found only in the languages of the
Indian subcontinent. They are unattested in Hebrew and other Semitic
languages, and in Greek and all other languages of that region. So I don't
think you should assume that the evidence you bring that peh, taw and kaf
were aspirated should be taken as implying the same of bet, gimel and dalet.

You remark that Kutscher's shifts 1 and 2 could be combined into one. This
seems far more probable to me at least for the voiced plosives. This process
is well attested in many other languages e.g. Spanish where intervocalic
voiced plosives have become fricatives.

I wonder how these data are affected by the question of when Greek phi, chi
and theta changed from aspirated plosives to fricatives. Is there clear
evidence for the date of this change?

Peter Kirk
peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:b-hebrew-
> bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Shai Heijmans
> Sent: 01 June 2003 21:01
> To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Are peh, taw and kaf aspirated in Biblical Hebrew?
>