Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

gfsomsel:

This was a question that I never expected 
to ask. I had been taught in class that the 
Masoritic points preserved the original 
pronunciation. I didn’t question my prof, 
not even years later.

But if Rolf is correct, even some of the 
pronunciations that we thought we knew from 
the Masoretes are wrong.

When I learned the pre-exilic Hebrew font 
face and noticed that the glyphs were very 
similar to Greek, my reaction was, do you 
suppose? . . . Nah.

Then I noticed in Nehemiah that apparently 
the samech had the ‘x’ or ‘ks’ sound, that 
in Ezra apparently Aramaic did not have 
that sound, that in the New Testament I 
came across a few places where I found a 
‘t’ or a ‘p’ where I expected to find a 
theta or ‘f’ according to Masoritic 
pronunciations, and so forth, I can’t help 
but question.

Right now I have another question: is it 
possible that Biblical Hebrew pronunciation 
originally consisted of each consonant 
being followed by a vowel? So that a house 
would have been a “beta”, a door a 
“deleta”, a palm of a hand a “kapa” and so 
forth? I haven’t the vaguest idea how to 
demonstrate this idea, just that as I try 
to read the unpointed text out loud, the 
intuitive impression I get is that’s the 
way it feels it should be spoken.

There are two things that need to be kept 
in mind in these questions: 1) with very 
rare exceptions, they make no difference 
semantically, i.e. they won’t affect 
translations and 2) there is no definitive 
way either to prove or to disprove these 
questions (that I know of), so it just 
makes them interesting speculation.

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: Polycarp66 AT aol.com

> In a message dated 3/14/2004 10:21:23 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
> Polycarp66 AT aol.com writes:
> I'm afraid you lost me here.  If the tradition which the Masoretes recorded 
> predated them and that's all we have that goes back even that far, how can 
> you 
> know that the traditions don't reflect the original pronunciation?  We can 
> obviously know nothing regarding the original pronunciation unless it is 
> for 
> such 
> items as were virtually transliterated into the Greek of the LXX.  Are you 
> privy to some special revelation concerning this?
> ______
> 
> I should have said "We can obviously know nothing regarding A MORE ORIGINAL 
> pronunciation."
> 
> gfsomsel

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