Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Dear Peter:

My responses are interspaced within your message.

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>

> On 07/10/2003 23:00, Karl Randolph wrote:
> 
> >Dear Peter:
> >
> >How do you know that it is not Arabic from over a thousand years later 
> >that split one root into two? ...
> >
> Because such things don't happen, within the rather well understood 
> processes of how languages change over time.

Oh? Languages sometimes add phonemes, sometimes reduce phonemes, over time. 
Who can predict which way an individual language will go?
> 
> >... Even with post-Biblical Hebrew, we see that one letter, sin, was split 
> >into two: sin and shin, ...
> >
> No, as Trevor has explained. Sin and shin were always pronounced 
> differently, but were written with one letter because there was no 
> separate letter available for sin.
> 
You have no evidence for this claim.
> >  
> >
> Karl, it is clear that you have very little idea of how languages change 
> over time. Please study some comparative linguistics, history of Semitic 
> languages etc, and weigh carefully the evidence used for their 
> reconstructions, before presuming to know these things better than me, a 
> trained linguist, and than the experts in this field whose theories I 
> have summarised.

Peter, you neither know me nor what I have studied. It seems that Proverbs 
18:13 fits this situation. I make no presumptions on your studies and 
learning.

True, my studies of linguistics emphasized anthropological linguistics, but 
at the same time I also studied historical changes in languages. For example, 
in German from about 1000 years ago, the double t “tt” first changed to a 
“ts” with a sound like the tsada, adding a phoneme, then resolved to a “ss” 
‘ß’ as it is in modern German, subtacting the added phoneme. Ancient Greek 
showed a similar progression from Attic Greek to Koiné Greek. There were 
other changes as well.

If Moses wrote Torah about 1400 BCE as tradition avers (and I see no reason 
to doubt this tradition), then it follows that the alphabet more closely 
follows the pronunciation and linguistic structure of the period than any 
other period or language.

> 
> -- 
> Peter Kirk
> peter AT qaya.org (personal)
> peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
> http://www.qaya.org/
-- 
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