Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Kevin Riley" <klriley AT alphalink.com.au>]

 You notice I said "seem to fit".  We do have a few late inscriptions
written in both Roman and Greek script, and apart from a possible
development of 'kaph' to 'khaph' indicating maybe a development of begad
kepat forms it seems that the consonants do fit the script.  Perhaps it is
safer to say that as yet there is not much evidence to suggest that they don
t.  Internal evidence suggests that Akkadian, Ugaritic and Aramaic were not
phonemic, and external evidence is available for those languages and Hebrew.
 I would not be surprised if Phoenician was not phonemic, but in that case
it is odd that the script fits [with the exception of sin/shin] the language
that [we presume] developed later in Israel and also fits the known
pronunciation of standard Aramaic.  It seems better to take that as
indicating that Phoenician was developed for a language with 22 consonants
until we find evidence against that position.  The problem with the sin/shin
distinction is that neither Roman nor Greek scripts can distinguish these
sounds.

By "witness of history" I meant simply that a few ancient writers credited
the Phoenicians with inventing the alphabet, and there is no alternative
claim in historical writings.  No such claim is made for the Hebrews having
invented the script, so I prefer to have as a working hypothesis that it was
a Phoenician 'invention'.  Reality is usually messier than history suggests,
but surely it is better to go with a theory that has a long history than one
which has no evidence at all?

Kevin Riley
 
-------Original Message-------
 
From: Peter Kirk
Date: 11/03/05 23:47:33
 
On 03/11/2005 01:42, Kevin Riley wrote:
 
>... The fact that the Phoenician letters
>seem to fit so well the consonantal structure of the Phoenician language
>makes it one of the wonders of the history of languages. ...
>
 
Well, surely there are some assumptions here. The Phoenician language
has been reconstructed almost entirely from the rather few surviving
texts in the Phoenician alphabet. So of course the reconstructed
language corresponds well with the alphabet. But it is only an
assumption that the actual spoken language corresponded well with
written form.
 
For other ancient languages like early Greek the only reason that we
know that the pronunciation differed from the alphabet was because in
the large corpus of surviving texts there are tell-tale variations, and
also meta-texts describing the language. In the much smaller Phoenician
corpus there is much less variation and probably no meta-texts. So
scholars were forced to assume that the alphabet is more-or-less
phonetic. Of course if this is assumed at the start, it remains in the
conclusions.
 
For example, we know that the Phoenicians did not distinguish ayin and
ghayin, sin and shin etc in their writing. But is it therefore safe to
conclude that they did not distinguish them in speech? Only if we
presuppose that the script was phonetic - which is a very dangerous
assumption if no other scripts in the ancient world were phonetic.
 
>... As the witness of
>history is unanimous in ascribing this script to the Phoenicians ...
>
 
I'm not sure what you mean by "the witness of history", but i understand
that the story as reconstructed by modern scholarship is by no means so
clear cut that this script originates with the Phoenicians. The
Phoenician script is derived from earlier proto-Canaanite scripts, with
certain modifications. The specific form of it known as "Phoenician" may
have been used first by the Phoenicians and then borrowed by Hebrews,
Moabites etc. But I wonder if there is any real evidence for this,
rather than assumptions based on uncertain sources, like the old story
that the Greeks borrowed their script from the Phoenicians, and the
supposed conclusion that the script is perfectly fitted to the
Phoenician language.
 
>... I see no
>reason to doubt that, especially when it does not fit the Hebrew or Aramaic
>languages as well.
>
>
 
We know that the script does not fit Hebrew and Aramaic well because we
know more about subsequent forms of these languages. We know little
about later forms of Phoenician, and so we don't know that the script
fitted Phoenician any better.
 
--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/