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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Proto-Semitic, was WAYYIQTOL

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Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: Karl Randolph <kwrandolph AT email.com>
  • Cc: Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Proto-Semitic, was WAYYIQTOL
  • Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 02:58:52 -0800

On 15/03/2004 17:28, Karl Randolph wrote:

Peter:

After all, this is the B-Hebrew list, so why shouldn?t we limit this discussion to Biblical Hebrew?

What steamed me is to read that, based on this postulated proto-Semitic, Biblical Hebrew was different from what we should expect from looking at the unpointed text. It steamed me because it is taking concepts from outside of Biblical Hebrew and making it more authoritative than the surviving texts.


Understood. But the original discussion was about the history of the pronunciation of Hebrew. That cannot be understood apart from consideration of other languages. And if we introduce the good evidence that the Hebrew alphabet is borrowed from Phoenician and so not necessarily ideally adapted to Hebrew, we understand better some of the anomalies.

If we studied English on the assumption that its alphabet was developed for English alone, and in isolation from other languages using the same alphabet, we would get some very strange results. If we recognise that the alphabet is borrowed from Latin, we can understand much better what has happened.

Do you suppose that when Phoenician and Aramaic adopted the 22 character Hebrew alphabet, ...


I don't suppose anything based on this assumption which almost certainly incorrect. Here you are immediately going outside the BH and making comparisons with other languages which use a similar alphabet. You can do this safely only if you look at the evidence for these other languages, and note such points as that surviving Phoenician inscriptions are older than Hebrew ones, and that there is at least some similarity between the Phoenician alphabet and the even older Ugaritic one.

... that they adopted it unchanged because they shared the same set of consonantal phonemes at that time? (That?s just a throw out question, I don?t intend to discuss it at length.)


No, for adoption in either direction. English borrowed the Latin alphabet unchanged (and later added three new letters as adaptations of existing ones) although the phoneme inventories were quite different. Similarly for Greek borrowing Phoenician etc etc.


--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/





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