Biblical Hebrew Forum

[gfsomsel AT juno.com]

On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 21:01:45 -0500 "Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>
writes:
> Peter:
> 
> I am not a scholar of Greek language, New Testament nor NT textual 
> criticism, never was, and so I leave the argument to those who are 
> scholars. Harstad and his school claim that the "Coptic" (referring 
> to Egypt, not language) rescension of Greek manuscripts is not the 
> oldest line, and I, beyond reporting about it, will leave the 
> discussion alone.
> 
> However, I now think that the soft sounds of BGD KPT letters in 
> Hebrew are a late development, not original. And to see that at 
> least in the Byzantine tradition of NT manuscripts that some of the 
> transcribed names had the hard sound where later Hebrew had soft 
> gives some (weak) support to my theory. That the texts that Nestlé 
> is based on have a later pronunciation could very well be a result 
> that they were produced in a millieu where there were many Jews 
> (e.g. Alexandria) who could keep the scribes up to date on the 
> latest Hebrew pronunciations.
> 
> The claim that the soft and hard sounds were original and peacefully 
> coexisted over the millennia until the Masorites codified them with 
> their points, does not match known patterns of language shift and 
> development. (Don't anybody say that I claim that the Masorites 
> invented anything other than the points themselves. They did not 
> invent the pronunciations they codified.) Languages both lose and 
> gain phones and phonemes, and I don't see that Hebrew should be an 
> exception.
> 
> Karl W. Randolph.
> 
___________

Karl,

I don't know of a "Harstad", but there was a Farstad.  His lobbying for
the Byz text hasn't found much acceptance in most circles of NT studies. 
I wouldn't rely on him.

george
gfsomsel