Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 9/8/05, Karl Randolph wrote:
> 
> I'd hesitate to use either proto-Canaanite
> or Ugaritic as evidence for this.
> 
> First, Ugaritic was a different language,
> and it may have had phones that Biblical
> Hebrew never had.
> 
> Secondly, proto-Canaanite apparently had
> many variations.
...

Karl, 

It is 9 September, so in a week or two the new JBL will
come out and then the whole JBL 124.2 will probably be 
available for everyone to view.  Then you can read this article 
and comment on his conclusions or methodology.  Incidentally,
in this very sentence, I have used the letter "c" several times
with a phoneme different from the way it was used earlier in
the paragraph.  Most of the earlier times, use the phoneme "k" 
as in "comment" or "conclusions", but here "Incidentally" and
"sentence" have the phoneme "s".   How do you propose to
deal with this alteration of phonemes even though the 
graphemes are exactly the same?  Do you propose that you
know for sure that the Hebrews invented the alphabet and
therefore used only the phonemes in their language?  Do
you propose that you know for sure that different linguistic
developments (such as those that might have led to the
"k"/"s" alteration) did not develop in Hebrew and merge two
phonemes prior to Hebrew becoming a written language?
It appears to me that you depend on these two assumptions
for your thesis.  Both your thesis and the assumptions are
highly unlikely.  But let's wait for the article to be viewable 
publicly and then you can comment on it too.  I think this
article demonstrates well the difference in quality between
forum and discussion list postings and methodological
peer-reviewed studies

Yitzhak Sapir