Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>

> 
> On 15/11/2004 20:48, Karl Randolph wrote:
> 
> >Yigal:
> >
> >When the Greeks adopted the Hebrew/Phoenician alphabet, did a difference 
> >between sin and shin exist in Phoenician? There was no written difference. 
> >
> >The Greeks retained the samekh as a Xi "x" sound while they shifted the 
> >name to the sigma, which was the sin/shin. The pre-exilic form of Hebrew 
> >samekh was almost identical to the Greek uncial Xi and in the same place 
> >in the alphabet. The Greeks dropped the tsada.
> >  
> >
> 
> The situation with the Greek borrowing from Phoenician (or whatever) is 
> in fact not so simple. See 
> http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/nonattic.html sections 2 and 3. 
> A quote:
> 
> > Faced with the four sibilants of Phoenecian, which they memorised 
> > without quite distinguishing correctly—especially when they didn't 
> > have half the sibilants in their own language—the Greeks jumbled the 
> > forms and the names of the letters, so that they no longer correspond 
> > to the Phoenecian originals.
> 
> 
> The Greeks originally borrowed all four sibilants, but later dropped 
> san, which had the same position in the alphabet as tsade, and perhaps 
> the same shape, but did not correspond in sound.

What I noticed is that the uncial Greek forms of sigma and xi are 
recognizably derivitive from the paleo-Hebrew alphabet both in form and 
pronunciation, and that the use of the xi was used mostly in the same places 
as the samekh in Hebrew in the transliteration of Persian names as late as 
Ezra and Nehemiah. (The writer of Esther appears not to have known Hebrew as 
well, as can be seen also by his use of Aramaic loan words and 
pronunciations(?) into Hebrew (Aramaic used sin/shin in the places where 
Hebrew used samekh and and Greek xi.))

> 
> >It looks as if Aramaic originally had a difference between samekh and sin 
> >at the time of Daniel, but by a century later, at the time of Ezra or 
> >Esther, it either was in the process of or had completed dropping that 
> >difference. Apparently Hebrew under the influence of Aramaic dropped the 
> >difference within a few generations of Ezra. Hence Arabic which is even 
> >later did not have the samekh.
> >  
> >
> 
> I'm not quite sure where this last idea comes from. It seems clear that 
> the Arabic seen س corresponds to Hebrew samekh, and the Arabic sheen ش 
> corresponds to Hebrew shin. This is clear from their numeric values - 
> Arabic seen = Hebrew samekh = 60, Arabic sheen = Hebrew shin = 300. In 
> palaeo-Hebrew both samekh and shin were made up of three elements, and 
> because of this their shapes coalesced in Arabic and had to be 
> distinguished by the three dots on sheen.

We'll have to ask what Yigal meant when he said that Arabic doesn't have a 
samekh, though your description of the seen and sheen seems to give an 
answer. From the above, it looks as if the samekh was dropped, and the seen 
moved over to its place. I don't know Arabic, so I depend on youall to give 
me accurate information.

As for the paleo-Hebrew, the samekh was made up of three horizontal lines 
with a vertical line tying them together, like a Greek uncial xi with a 
vertical line piercing it, though sometimes the vertical line dropped below 
the bottom horizontal line. The sin/shin letter looked very similar to a 
Greek uncial sigma rotated 90° counter clockwise. They looked very different 
from each other, I do not see how their shapes could coalesce.

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