Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yigal Levin" <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
> Greek theta, by the way, was originally and still in classical times an
> aspirated t, distinguished from tau which was unaspirated. I suppose
> that aspiration was the Greek way of making a distinct "emphatic" sound,
> whereas for Semites the "emphatic" sound was (and in Arabic still is)
> pharyngealised. It was only later, in Koine or Byzantine times, that
> Greek theta took on the sound of English th. Hebrew tav (without dagesh)
> also took on this sound in some dialects, but for different reasons. In
> Arabic this sound is represented by a separate letter, like the Arabic
> version of tav but with three dots instead of two, which (from its
> numeric value) was originally added to the end of the alphabet straight
> after tav.
>
This often happens when a writing system is transferred from one language to
another.
Greek used those Phoenecian letters whose sounds Greek didn't need (Aleph,
He, Het, Yod, Ain) for vowels, eventually dropped others (like Vav and Qoph)
but had to invent letters for sounds that the Semites didn't have. Latin had
to "reinvent" some of the letters that Greek had dropped, like F, V and W.
Hebrew has traditionally used Qoph to translitterate a foreign "K" and a Tet
for "T". Arabic uses Kaph and Tav, since they pronounce the Qoph and Tet
distinctively. This makes translitteration from Hebrew to Arabic rather
strange, since Arabic considers Hebrew to be a foreign language. Hebrew, on
the other hand, usually tries to keep the Arabic spelling of words. In
Hebrew, you will see the word "Turkey" spelled either +wrqyh or twrkyh.

Yigal