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b-hebrew - RE: [b-hebrew] linguistics, was Re: Prov. 30:19

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Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

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  • From: "Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>
  • To: "Hebrew" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: [b-hebrew] linguistics, was Re: Prov. 30:19
  • Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2003 16:12:07 -0500


----- Original Message -----
From: "Trevor Peterson" <06peterson AT cua.edu>

> Karl wrote:
>
> > Did Semitic
> > languages always have the number of phonemes and roots as
> > indicated by modern Arabic and other modern Semitic
> > languages, obscured in ancient Hebrew by an ill fitting 22
> > character alphabet, or was the 22 character alphabet evidence
> > of the original number of phonemes in ancient Semitic
> > languages, some of which phonemes later split into two or
> > more daughter phonemes, just as early Viking speech with 16
> > phonemes developed into modern Norwegian with roughly double
> > that amount?
>
> You're blurring the picture by failing to distinguish the relevant
> factors. It's not just a matter of an ill-fitting alphabet. If an
> alphabet developed appropriately enough for one situation and was later
> used in other, less ideal situations, then what we're really seeing is a
> stage of development when some Semitic languages had lost consonantal
> phonemes.

Lost, or added? Was the original Hebrew usage appropriate and other languages
ill-fitting? Were those phonemes added or lost? What does the evidence say?

> > I happen to reject that presupposition, as should be pretty
> > clear by now. The original 22 character alphabet is evidence
> > for the original 22 consonental phonemes present in the
> > original Hebrew language, such as what David spoke about 1000
> > BCE and Moses wrote four centuries earlier. My philosophical
> > presuppositions color how I percieve the development of the
> > Hebrew language.
>
> What presupposition? Do you think people are just assuming that there
> were more phonemes early on?

What I am saying is that the evidence, as I see it, indicates that there were
only 22 consonental phonemes in ancient Hebrew up to the Galut Babel. That
includes that the bgdkpt and sin/shin differentiations did not exist until
afterwards.

> You have yet even to attempt an explanation
> of cognate correspondences according to your model. If, as you suggest,
> the process worked in reverse from what pretty much everyone else is
> saying, then how is it that the divergences in various Semitic languages
> line up with each other?

How soon in cognate languages did they appear?

> Plus, you don't seem to have taken account of
> the existence of the larger consonantal inventory present in Old South
> Arabian, which is attested about as early as anything we have in Hebrew.
> Indeed, the inventory there is larger than that found in Arabic, so you
> can stop appealing to the time difference involved with Classical Arabic
> any time you like.

How early do you mean by “anything we have in Hebrew”? The proto-Sinaictic
writing that I have seen that I can decypher, is readible from Biblical
Hebrew. The proto-sinaitic stone that I referrenced its URL in an earlier
posting, was found in Scandinavia, yet it followed classical Biblical Hebrew
with a slight variation. So which came earlier? Even if a larger number of
phonemes were found early on in a cognage language, does that mean that
Biblical Hebrew had all those phomenes? It appears to me that Biblical Hebrew
had 22 characters, precisely because it had 22 consonental phonemes.

> > Do you agree that we are dealing with differences that are
> > more philosophical than linguistic?
>
> I don't.

Why?

> Trevor Peterson
> CUA/Semitics

Karl W. Randolph.

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