Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>]

  The subject is too broad: what period is meant by"ancient pronounciation"?  
The time span  ranges  well over a thousand years, as we know. Naturally  
pronounciation changes over such a long time.
 
  One can start with the Amarna period, middle of fourteenth century BCE, and 
 only about six generations prior to the famous Merenptah Stele that 
articulates the name Israel for the first time.The tablets include many West 
Semitic personal names, some of which are found in the HB.
 
  Richard S. Hess made an excellent study of the Amarna Personal Names; since 
the tablets were written in the syllabic cuneiform, approximate 
pronounciations are possible. They would correspond with the way names in 
Early Israel would have been pronounced.
 
 Approx. seven centuries later  there are Heb. names mostly in Assyrian but 
also in Babylonian records., both, again,  written in syllabic cuneiform.
 
 Then comes the evidence of the LXX.
 
  Given that the above mentioned  sources exist, nevertheless decisions on 
this matter must remain tentative. The MT  probably does not retain original 
pronounciations, but here too one must be careful: a PN like Yaaqov may well 
retain, as read nowadays,( in the modified Sephardic Israeli pronounciation) 
the  same sounds it had in Mari in the eighteenth century BCE.
 
Uri
 
 


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>From deborahmillier AT yahoo.com  Mon Feb 16 20:31:53 2004
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From: Deborah Millier <deborahmillier AT yahoo.com>
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Subject: [b-hebrew] Re: Ancient pronunciation of biblical names
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SHALOM KHAVRIM,

A few days ago I asked a question that is of
particular interest to me...but apparently not to too
many others.  I asked for theories about what
linguistic factors might have contributed to the
reduction of the first syllables in so many of the
Tiberian renditions of names and words.  I mentioned
that since Aramaic often retains the older
pronunciations (as we understand them), Hebrew's
prolonged exposure to it probably wouldn't count as a
real factor.  I then asked about prolonged exposure to
Greek, although I don't have the linguistic know-how
to evaluate whether this might have even made a
difference or not.  

As I randomly go through Greek names in my mind, I
discover that stress tends to be on the first or
second syllable, with a few exceptions.  So this line
of thinking seems to do little good unless second
syllable stresses (E.g. tim-O-the-os) affected Hebrew
name pronunciations to the point of reducing the first
syllables.  I'm rambling because I have just an
intro-level (2 semesters) of linguistic training. 
Therefore, I'm really trying to coax others among us,
with better linguistic foundations, to try their hands
at speculating about what factors may have contributed
to this phenomenon in Tiberian Hebrew.  Any takers?

KOL TUV,
-- Michael Millier

P.S. One person (sorry I deleted the message so I've
forgotten your name) suggested, along with a
commentator he had read, that because ancient-ancient
people spoke slower than just ancient people, words
became veritable acronyms.  I have a problem with that
view for a couple of reasons:

(1) We can speculate how fast ancient-ancient people
spoke, but we have no evidence to my knowledge that it
would have differed substantially from the simply
ancient people.  I mean, how could we know?  And how
fast can people's speech speed up?  We're still not at
the "acronym" stage in most modern languages that I
know of.  Furthermore, I have heard pre-literate
people who spoke their language at breakneck speed and
I have heard those in great centers of industry who 
d-r-a-w-l-e-d painfully.  

(2) I might agree that the tendency of modernity is to
speed things up, but Tiberian Hebrew was not modern. 
And then-contemporary Babylonian Hebrew (same general
time-frame) maintained some of the older
pronunciations.  Therefore, according to this
"speed-up" theory, how would this evidence be
explained?


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