Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Read, James C" <K0434995 AT kingston.ac.uk>]

Scholars believe that the hebrews originally wrote with 
no vowels and that the matres lectionis (vowels' mothers) 
were the first attempts of the hebrews to add vowels to 
the consanantal script.
However, there is no real evidence that they didn't also 
have a consanantal value. I personally find it difficult to 
believe that the hebrews would decide to start writing in 
some vowels but not form a complete system of vowelling. 
It is much more likely that what we view today as 'matres 
lectionis' represented original consanant sounds and 
coincidentally gave a system of predicting the vowel sign 
with no real intention of the implementors of this system 
to create a vowel system. Admittedly, there are many cases 
where they are no longer pronouced as a consanant but this 
can quite easily be put down to our laziness of speech. 
e.g. The final 'he' requires much more effort to pronounce 
than to drop and doesn't help the listener to distinguish 
the word any better and so it was easily dropped (IMO). 
Such phonomenon can be easily observed in many languages. 
In florence they spirantise the 'ci' in certain circumstances 
to form a 'h' sound,while the rest of Italy pronounces it 'k'.
In tenerife the final 's' of the 2nd m.s is dropped whereas in 
mainland Spain this never happens e.g. 'como te llamas?'
In England, in the majority of regions, there is great laziness 
to pronounce the 't' when it is mid-word, and it is more often 
pronounced as a guttural than as a 't' sound.



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Having a working hypothesis is a standard research tool.  When the  working
hypothesis is proven by research, this does not render it a  "preconceived
idea" in  the negative sense.  Of course, if the  hypothesis is disproved it 
is
discarded (or modified).  But if it works, it  works.

While the corpus of biblical Hebrew we have to work with is comparatively
small, it is large enough to yield certain conclusions based on what is
available.  Such conclusions may not apply in every respect to the total,
comprehensive entity of the ancient language.  Yet we have a vivid picture  
that
captures frames of a certain epochal period of the history of the  language.

IMO, Rolf makes many convincing arguments on biblical Hebrew, based on a
major sifting and close, detailed examination of the information that is
currently available.

Solomon Landers

In a message dated 07/26/2005 7:14:05 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
peterkirk AT qaya.org writes:

Well, I am  not quite sure when Rolf considers that he started these
studies. It  certainly was a long time ago. But already on 4th September
1998, the  first individual post I have from him (I was receiving digests
from July  1997 which are not so easy to search), he wrote to this list:

> I  claim that
> imperfectivity and perfectivity are connected with the verb  form and not
> with the context: all wayyiqtols and yiqtols are  imperfective and all
> qatals and weqatals are  perfective.


But this was certainly before he completed his study of  all of the verb
forms in the Bible. Therefore he came to that study, or at  least
completed and drew conclusions from it, with this preconceived idea  of
the Hebrew verb system, which is effectively the same as the two form
model which he now presents as the result of his  studies.