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  • From: "Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Ayin and Ghayin
  • Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 19:29:56 -0500

Yitzhak:

In previous messages concerning getting a PhD in Hebrew,
I bemoaned the fact that my lack of an opportunity cost me
the chance to learn Ugaritic, Aramaic and Arabic, but that
the silver lining is that I instinctively react to good vs. bad
Biblical Hebrew.

Just because a cognate language has a phoneme does not
mean that Biblical or older Hebrew ever had that phoneme.

To give a modern example, most Germanic languages have
the ö (O Umlaut) sound, but there is no evidence (that I
have ever heard of, at least) that English has ever had that
sound. So, on the streets of San Francisco, if I hear a person
speaking Cantonese and pronouncing all his ö sounds as
"er", I know that he at least grew up in the U.S. because that
shift is American accent, not native Chinese.

Similarly, even if all surviving cognate languages to Biblical
Hebrew have a certain set of phonemes, does not mean that
Biblical Hebrew ever had those phonemes. There is no
evidence from within Biblical Hebrew (Mishnaic Hebrew and
later, including Masoretic Hebrew, don't count) that it had
more than 22 consonental sounds.

While there is no proof, there is evidence that those who
returned from the Babylonian Captivity were more at home
in Aramaic than Hebrew, therefore they read Hebrew with
an Aramaic accent, including assigning Aramaic patterns
of reading graphemes. Therefore, theirs and their
descentants' pronunciations are not accurate
representations of Biblical pronunciations.

As for the sin/shin bifurcation, there is at least some
evidence that they were once one letter. I discussed this
in greater detail before, but there are several words that
are sometimes written with a sin, other times with a shin,
and there are examples of words from the same root
where one derivitive has a sin while another a shin. (The
shibboleth story has a difference between a samekh and
a sin/shin.) Of course the Masoretic dots differentiating
between the two did not exist in Biblical times. Were
these two sounds that merged before Moses? There is
no evidence.

As for the proto-Sinaitic or proto-Canaanitic writing,
those examples I have seen are too short to give a clear
evidence if they were even Hebrew or which cognate
language. Further, there were so many different writing
styles that we can't definitively state even the number of
letters in their alphabet, as one writer may have used one
grapheme while another one significantly different in
shape for the same letter.

Back in the days when all alphabetic writing was done
phonetically, spelling was fluid and languages added and
dropped letters as they added and dropped phonemes; or
if they adopted an alphabet from another language, they
tended to adjust it to their language by changing the
values of some letters, while adding and dropping other
letters. An example of the latter is how Greek dropped
some letters, changed some others to vowels, and added
others at the end. The Bible has many, many examples of
fluid spelling, but that it from its earliest history that we
know of had 22 letters is an indication that those were the
consonental phonemes in use at the time Bible was
written, no more. While not proof, it is evidence.

To sum up, I find evidences from cognate languages
inconclusive, and the lack of surviving Hebrew writing
(very few examples predating the DSS) leaves us unable
to prove either side.

Notice, I do not claim proof for either set of claims. I just
point out that the evidences for your side are IMHO just
as weak as for my side, if not more so.

Now let's see the article.

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>
>
> On 9/17/05, Karl Randolph wrote:
>
> > If the article gives the same arguments that you just
> > did, arguments based on assumptions that cannot be
> > confirmed, then I'll just have to conclude that the
> > article gives speculations and no more.
>
> Which assumptions do you identify above that are simply
> "speculations" and no more and cannot be confirmed?
> Could you please identify them specifically?
>
> In fact, from what I can see, most of what I wrote above can
> be confirmed simply by reading any text in Arabic, Aramaic,
> and Ugaritic, of which only Ugaritic is not a living language.
> Furthermore, many of the sound shifts noted above are
> sometimes present in various dialects of spoken Arabic. It's
> one thing to say something cannot be confirmed. It's another
> thing to be given specific languages where reading texts of
> that language will demonstrate and confirm what I wrote, and
> just not read them. I asked you now twice, without answer,
> and I ask again now, did you read any sizeable material in
> Aramaic, Arabic, and Ugaritic? Ugaritic should be especially
> suitable, because like Biblical Hebrew, it is a dead language,
> but unlike Biblical Hebrew, comes mostly without vowels or
> Massoretic notes, so it's perfect for your type of reading. The
> corpus is also available (from what I understand, almost
> completely) online:
>
> http://www.labherm.filol.csic.es/sapanu2003/UDBTEXTS.pdf
>
> The above website also has a concordance (in Spanish, but
> that can't stop anyone):
>
> http://www.labherm.filol.csic.es/sapanu2003/CUW.zip
>
> For good measure, I'll also include a link to their list of
> publications:
>
> http://www.labherm.filol.csic.es/sapanu2004/publicaciones.html
>
> > Why try to prove something that is unprovable, which
> > at the same time cannot be disproven?
>
> You tell me. You're the one that I perceive is trying to prove
> the following assumptions or assumptions that would be
> false if the following are not assumed:
>
> 1) The Massoretic marks of Sin and Shin were not present
> in the original language in which the Torah was written and
> do not differentiate between semantic meanings.
> 2) There are no other similar letters to Sin and Shin which
> were phonemically different in the original language in which
> the Torah was written but were written with the same
> grapheme.
> 3) There are no other similar letters to Sin and Shin which
> were phonemically different in a more ancient stage of the
> language but by the time that the Torah was written had
> already merged into a single phoneme.
>
> Yitzhak Sapir

--
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