Biblical Hebrew Forum

[MarjorieAlley AT cs.com]

In a message dated 9/19/2005 7:23:31 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
kwrandolph AT email.com writes:


> I noticed the same pattern in the New Testament with 
> transliterated Hebrew names.
> 
> But then I noticed something else. In the Byzantine 
> tradition of MMS there was a slight difference between 
> Galilean and Judaean names: some of the Galilean 
> names had tau or pi where Judaean names had theta or 
> phi. To me it looks as if a dialectal difference. (Was this the 
> origin of Peter's Galilean accent?) For example, Nazareth 
> was consistently spelled Nazaret in the Byzantine 
> tradition.
> 
> I think the practice of spirantizing some hard consonants 
> started in the south (Egypt) and gradually moved north, so 
> Galilee was still not fully transformed at the time the New 
> Testament was written. But the LXX, coming from the 
> south, used spirants.
> 
> Karl W. Randolph.
> 


Thank you very much. I've been interested for awhile in how the Hebrew names 
are transliterated into Greek. I'll be looking at the tau/theta, pi/phi 
variants in the NT apparatus with new eyes from now on.

The practice of spirantizing the hard consonants is easier for me to 
understand in the case of some consonants than others. I am not a linguist, 
so to me 
the "p" and "f" sounds seem further apart in the way their are formed 
physically, than, say, a spirantized vs. hard qaf.

Thank you,
Marjorie Alley