Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 12/10/2003 08:32, Karl Randolph wrote:

> ... (As for the early Scandinavian runic writing, did the early Vikings have 
> only 16 phones in their speech, or did their 16 glyphs correspond to 16 
> phonemes? Only an interview with a surviving Viking can answer that.)
>  
Or did they have many more than 16 phonemes but for some reason only use 
16 glyphs?

> It is my belief that Hebrew started out as a phonetic writing system, where 
> each grapheme corresponded to a consonantal phone with a couple of exceptions 
> where waw and yod sometimes indicated vowels, only later, as the language 
> changed, added new phones and split one phoneme into two, were the graphemes 
> adjusted by adding dots to show the new phonetic values. We see the same 
> development in Arabic.
>  
Does your belief correspond with historical reality? Only an interview 
with a surviving Hebrew can answer that.

> Karl W. Randolph.
>
>  


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Peter Kirk
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