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  • From: Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: Fwd: [b-hebrew] Samekh/Sin
  • Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 11:44:53 +0200

Peter Kirk wrote:
> (Quoting me)
> >Loprieno's phonetic transcription of Coptic certainly has no
> >theta, ...
> >
>
> Thanks for the clarification. The Coptic alphabet, according to
> http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n2636.pdf, certainly
> seems to have a theta (although variously names thethe, thita,
> tutte, tida) which clearly corresponds in shape, position in the
> alphabet and numeric value with the Greek theta. If this document
> is in fact based on false information, there may just be time to
> stop the letter being separately encoded in Unicode, but it looks
> to me like it is clearly attested.

The text sample does not include this letter, among others. I
suppose now it's not meant to be all inclusive, but just to give a
general idea of the sound.

> >... Loprieno suggests that the AfroAsiatic *t. and *s. merge into
> >Eg. /d/, which in turn is realized as an ejective t. AfroAsiatic
> >emphatic velars *k. and *x. merge into /j-/ (commonly
> >transcribed d_), for example: AA *wrk. > Eg. w3d_ */`waRij-/
> >'green', Sem *warq (yaroq, in hebrew). However, this d_ is now
> >closer to Tsade: Tanis is transcribed Tsoan. Egyptian /d/ (heir of
> > *t. and *s.) is rendered by Semitic tet (t.) in Hebrew and
> >Babylonian, whereas in the other direction, Tet is rendered in
> >Egyptian by either /d/ or /t/.
> >
> Here I wonder if we are confusing what happened to Afroasiatic
> cognates with what happened to loan words. These things can be
> very different, when we are talking about rather distantly related
> languages. Contrast English cognates (via Germanic) of Latin and
> Greek words with English loan forms of those words, e.g. "five"
> (cognate) vs. "quint-" (Latin loan) vs. "pent-" (Greek loan). The
> phonetic correspondences for cognates are quite different from
> those for loan words. There are even similar mismatches within
> Germanic: "ship" (cognate) vs. "skip" and "skiff" (loans from
> Norse).

Both are discussed. But whereas (according to him), AA *s.
evolves to /d/, it is /d_/ which attains the close to s sound. By
the way, I forgot to point this out, but he has a note that
apparently disassociates himself from the view that AA represents
a proto-language. How he can speak of things like words,
phonemes and pronouns in AA being "heirs" of things in Semitic
and Egyptian without a proto-language is curious to me, but he
claims that there are various "theoretical models" which he
discusses in a different book. Above, he claims that the AA word
*wrk. evolves into Egyptian with the k. sound attaining an
ejective c like sound, and hence would be transliterated as tsade
if borrowed in Hebrew.

Yitzhak Sapir




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