Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Kevin:

Assumptions are not data.

Scholarly reconstructions are based on assumptions, 
therefore they too are not data.

In this case, the data are the 22 letters used by the 
different languages. The question is how do we interpret 
that data?

In the process of interpretation it is often necessary that 
we make assumptions, but we need to keep clearly in 
mind what we are doing.

I make the assumption, yes I know it is an assumption, that  
alphabetic use at least attempts to write phonetically. The 
writers may not get it perfectly, but at least there is the 
attempt. If the spelling remains fluid as seen by variants in 
spelling for the same word, even by the same author, yet 
the alphabet remains constant over a long period of time, 
that becomes evidence that the phonetic fit was pretty 
close. If within a couple of generations the alphabet is 
changed, that is evidence that a) the phonetic fit was poor, 
b) the language was in flux and changed or c) both of the 
above.

I mentioned before that when I took beginning Hebrew 
class, we students conspired to write English sayings in 
Hebrew letters for the professor to decipher when he 
rushed in his normal five minutes late. We wrote 
phonetically. Often it was impossible to indicate the 
English sounds using the Hebrew alphabet, not even 
when we used letter combinations. If instead of merely a 
game for class, we were townsmen adapting the alphabet 
for our daily records, it would take no more than a few 
years, at most, for us to invent new letters to indicate 
sounds not represented in the alphabet, drop the use 
of letters indicating sounds not found in our language, 
possibly to reposition some of the dropped letters for 
phonemes in our language that were not in the originating 
language and to use letter combinations where possible. 
And this is what we find in the history of Greek when it 
adopted the alphabet from the Phoenicians. Greek was 
also a language in flux with many dialectal variants that 
continued to be written through much of its history. We find 
the same pattern with the English adoption of the Latin 
alphabet, but there the phonetic fit was closer, yet letter 
combinations were used for sounds not in Latin.

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: "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.

-- 
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