Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 04/04/2005 22:47, Karl Randolph wrote:

> Uri:
>
> My objection to "proto-semitic" is not that such a language may have existed, 
> but the specific form postulated for it. In particular, I think that the concept that 
> all the phonemes ever expressed in a semitic language had to have been in proto-semitic 
> (I may have overstated this). As I understand it, the theory is that languages only 
> lose phonemes, and don't gain them.
>
> But this stands in direct contradiction to the documented history of some 
> languages. ...

Karl, it is by no means presupposed that Semitic languages never gained 
phonemes. Indeed the standard reconstruction includes such processes. 
For example, in earlier biblical Hebrew as in Arabic there were no 
separate phonemes /f/ and /v/, for [p] (perhaps aspirated) and [f] were 
contextual variants of the phoneme /p/, and [b] and [v] were variants of 
the phoneme /b/. But as certain vowels were contracted the situation 
arose in which separate /f/ and /v/ phonemes had to be recognised, for 
both [p] and [f], and both [b] and [v], could now occur contrastively in 
a few environments, specifically after a consonant and before a vowel. 
This is why dagesh qal/lene has to be written to disambiguate Hebrew 
pronunciation.

No doubt scholars better than you and me have considered carefully 
whether this kind of mechanism could explain the distinction between for 
example `ayin and ghayin which is found in Arabic and Ugaritic, whereas 
in later Hebrew, and apparently in Phoenician, there is no distinct 
ghayin. And these scholars have concluded that the more probable 
mechanism in this case is loss of an original distinction. They may of 
course be wrong. But if you wish to claim that they are, you need to 
provide proper evidence to back up your claim, rather than inaccurate 
accusations of methodological errors.

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



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