Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Yigal:

Even the /x/ sound is a type of sibilant, different from the sin.

I was being generous in saying that the samekh lost its differentiation from 
sin at about 300 BCE because of the people on this list who insist that 
Hebrew was still spoken in Judea as late as 100 CE or later. 

I think that when the exiles came back under Cyrus, the young people already 
spoke better Aramaic than Hebrew, using it in their daily speech, in the 
market and among themselves. By a generation later, when people read Tanakh, 
they read it with the Aramaic pronunciations of words, not the pre-exilic 
Hebrew pronunciations. By the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, only a few scholars 
remembered what were the pre-exilic pronunciations, among whom were found 
Ezra and Nehemiah. There is no historical proof of this theory, so I don’t 
push it.

Your mention of the spelling of Alexandar is just one more clue that supports 
that theory.

It is hard to say anything definite about pre-esilic pronunciation when the 
earliest hard evidence we have is from over a 1000 years later, namely the 
Masorites. I think the evidence tends towards that the samekh originally had 
the /x/ sound, but with no native speakers to interview there is no way to 
prove nor disprove the conclusion.

Karl W. Randolph.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Yigal Levin" <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>

> 
> Dear Karl,
> 
> The fact that Hebrew spells the name Alexander (who arrived of the scene in
> 333 BCE) as "Aleksander" is proof enough that at least at that time, Hebrew
> did not have an /x/ sound.
> There is absolutely no proof that Samekh ever had anything other than an /s/
> sound, though it was obviously different originally (in early Canaanite)
> than Sin.
> 
> Yigal
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>
> 
> 
> > Yigal:
> >
> > How do you know that Phoenician did not have an /x/? After all, when they
> took over the alphabet from the Hebrews, don’t you think they would have
> retained the same pronunciations as did Hebrew? And it appears to me that as
> late as Ezra and Nehemiah, the samekh was the Hebrew /x/. (Of course, there
> could have been changes that neither of us guess at that would make both of
> us wrong.)
> >
> > My take on it is that the difference between the samekh and the sin was
> lost fairly late, around fifth century BCE in Aramaic, while in Hebrew I’m
> guessing that it was lost around 300 BCE. Those are also about the times
> that the sin and shin were differentiated as different sounds. All of these
> changes occurred long after the Greeks adopted the alphabet.
> >
 …
> >
> > Karl W. Randolph.
-- 
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