Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Kevin:

When I was young, I visited the city of Génève on the 
western tip of Lac Lemàn (spelling?). When I wrote my 
parents, I mentioned that I visited Geneva (pronunciation 
is definitely different). But when I returned to Germany 
where I was living at the time, I told my neighbors that I 
had visited Genf (yet another transliteration of the name, 
again different from the original).

Or how about the capital of China: we used to call it 
Peking which, as far as I can tell, was a mispronunciation 
of the Cantonese Bak Ging (hard 'g'), but in Mandarin it is 
called "Bay Jin". And the Chinese ship is called a 'suen' in 
Cantonese, and I've been told it is a 'chuen' in Mandarin, 
yet we call it a 'junk' (as in trash). Big difference.

I can multiply these examples many times over, but the 
bottom line is that transliterations are untrustworthy. I don't 
a priori rule out transliterations, I rule them as 
untrustworthy because I have seen too many examples 
like those above.

As for cognate languages, those that are close enough 
that people can understand about 80% of what is said in 
the other language, can still find examples of words that 
have very different meanings in the different languages, 
yet they sound the same. When the languages drift apart 
enough so that one speaking one language no longer can 
understand one speaking the other, even those using the 
same alphabet can pronounce the letters differently, 
words that sound the same can be written differently, e.g. 
German "Haus" and "Boot" vs. English "house" and "boat", 
words that sound so similar that they could be the same 
often are not, e.g. German "Rat" vs. English "rat". 
Phonemes found in one are non-existant in the other, e.g. 
German ö and ü are not in English. Again I can multiply 
examples like these many times over. Like transliterations 
above, I find evidence from cognate languages as being 
untrustworthy, and that from experience, not a priori.

If I can't trust transliterations and cognate language data 
for modern languages, why should I trust such information 
for Biblical Hebrew?

Karl W. Randolph.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin Riley" <klriley AT alphalink.com.au>
> 
> ...  The
> data *is* there - you just a priori rule out most of it.  Neither
> transliterations nor cognate languages are as problematic as you want to
> believe.  They simply don't give the results you want.
> 
> Kevin Riley

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