Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Ayin and Ghayin

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • To: Karl Randolph <kwrandolph AT email.com>
  • Cc: B Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Ayin and Ghayin
  • Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2005 17:49:40 +0000

On 03/11/2005 17:29, Karl Randolph wrote:

... The proposition that the ancients did not know enough to write a phonetic alphabet is laughable, examples include apparently Tiffineg (originated in Scandinavia, there used apparently about 18th century BC) ...


??? Tifinagh is a script used in northern Africa in modern times, not an ancient Scandinavian script. If something like this was used in ancient Scandinavia, we have no way of knowing how phonetic or otherwise it might have been.

... and Ugaritic from the 14th century BC if the earlier dates are correct. ...


Here we have exactly the same issues as with Phoenician. The corpus may be larger, but all we know about the language is based on the assumption that the script is phonetic, which means that it is methodologically impossible to prove that the script is phonetic.

I don't say that the ancients could not have used a phonetic script. All we can say is that there are scripts which we know were not phonetic, and scripts concerning which we cannot know whether they were phonetic or not, but none that we actually know were phonetic.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page