Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

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

-- 
___________________________________________________________
Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com
http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm