Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

 I certainly assume that proto-NW Semitic had these distinctions.  They are
too widely found in all branches of Semitic not to be original shared
features.  The question is where in the history of the loss of distinctions
the Phoenician alphabet came.  The sin/shin distinction is probably the best
attested as original, simply by the fact that the 3 's' phonemes are found
in NW Semitic and South Arabian, which rules out a shared innovation.  The
fact that the use of the graphemes/phonemes coincide most of the time also
argues against separate innovations.  That Aramaic in Syria, Hebrew in
Canaan, and the South Arabian languages would all move an original 'shin' to
'sin' in exactly the same words seems very unlikely. 

Kevin Riley
 
-------Original Message-------
 
From: Peter Kirk
Date: 11/04/05 12:13:30
 
Fair enough. But we are really only presuming that Phoenician didn't
have a sin/shin distinction, and there is also the question of the
ayin/ghayin distinction, the one between the two hets, and some other
distinctions which survive in Arabic but not in Hebrew or Aramaic. Few
of these would be clearly distinguished in Greek or Latin transcription.
But then it does seem probable that there was some NW Semitic language,
probably at least similar to Phoenician, which has a 22 consonant
inventory and which formed the basis of the rather widespread 22 letter
alphabet.