Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

Karl,

I assume it takes you some period of time to write responses.  It also
takes me some time to write responses.  If I have to look up various
books, it can take longer.  Often I try to have the book with me to
transcribe the answer properly, and this can also take more time.  If
I need to look up links on the internet it also takes time to search out
the place where the links were mentioned or were the message resides
in the archive.  The point is, it takes me time and effort to write a
response, as I suppose it does to you.  That is why when you write
a response I read it through, sometimes going through several times.

I can understand that you do not have time to respond.  Although it
surprises me that while you don't have time to respond to me, you have
time to respond on the same subject to others.  You bring the subject
again over and over, and the same arguments are posed by others to
you.  You would like to represent the issue as being undecisive from
the point of view of evidence.  This is surprising in view of the fact you
have very little access to reputable and dependable sources of
evidence, and that those who do have access do not have your
opinion.  You are now bringing evidence from various Japanese
scripts.  I have to suppose that you are just as familiar with those
languages as you are with subjects which we already discussed: that is,
hardly at all and basing yourself mostly on vague descriptions of the
evidence by summary texts rather than on a more direct description of
the evidence or the evidence itself.  Ugaritic, for example, could be
studied from a grammar or the texts itself.  I read an Ugaritic text the
other day as an attempt to see how much I can read.  When I reached
"tg'rk" and the footnote related it to the root "ng'r"/guard, I assumed that
ng'r was related to Hebrew ncr, Aramaic n+r.  When I reread the section
on phonetics in the book in response to your claims of a phonetic
alphabet, I realized that indeed this was a feature of Ugaritic that I
missed.  But if you don't know Ugaritic, nor read Ugaritic texts, nor
Ugaritic grammars, how can you relate that Ugaritic is phonetic?  This
is a subject I know a little about, nor seem to have any wish to learn,
and I have to extend what I perceive of your knowledge of this subject
to other subjects you discuss.  So while I'm not acquainted with Old
English, my understanding from the tidbit I brought a few days back is
that eth/thorn never distinguished properly between hard dh/soft th.
Thus, "this" was spelled with a thorn.  And I assume there is more to
your Japanese evidence.  Your "Scandinavian" evidence seems a
forgery as that script is said to have developed only during the last
2000 years.

When you represent the issue as being undecisive, there are others
who might want to illustrate just how decisive the case is.  In this case,
you have to support your argument.  The only reason that the discussion
so far as evolved to so many different lines of argument is that no line of
argument you have proposed thus far has come down to anything
decisive in favor of your theories.  It seems already in your first message
on this topic, you saw the need to anticipate various counter arguments
that might be proposed against your theory.

So I will assume that, true or not, you read my recent posts to you.
And if you don't want to respond for lack of time, that is your issue.  But
I won't reiterate the issues again.  I will just point you to the place where
I discussed them previously.  This topic -- in fact, almost exclusively this
topic -- rises again and again in almost every discussion: xrm, xsd, this
one.  In all of them you bring up the same similar arguments.   In light
of my experience in this discussion I assume that you constantly bring
up an argument and then fail to follow it up.  (I'm not just speaking of the
most recent response but also particular threads in the discussion like
$m/&m).  Even this response ended up being long in order to cover the
various points you raised only since that last response.

You are bringing evidence from various place names for your argument.
However place names have a tendency to be borrowed and then develop
separately in the borrowed language and in the borrower language.
Consider the place name "Jerusalem" and "Yerushalaim" where the
first seems to have developed *:->e, *i -> j, *ai -> e, and borrowed initially
$ as "s" because it had no $.  A much more pertinent argument would be
to bring up transliterations of foreign (but non borrowed) words or personal
names in texts.  There is also an issue of different perceptions  The
letter X (even H. not just H_) is perceived to be transliterated into english
differently: Hebrew speakers generally perceive it closer to H while English
speakers generally perceive it closer to K/C.  In the case of place name
or borrowed foreign words, transliterations are always subject to two
different perceptions and two different separate linguistic lines of
development.  A much more pertinent argument would be to bring up
transliterations of foreign (but non-borrowed) words, or personal names in
various documents.  That would parallel the case of the Aramaic bilingual
from Fekherye where we see how an Aramean perceived Akkadian
translated into Aramaic, and Aramaic transliterated into Akkadian.  It
would also parallel the other examples of transliterations provided thus
far such as the Hexapla.

You gave an argument for the failure of cognate languages: German
"Haus" and "Boot" vs. English "house" and "boat".  I'm not sure what
you are trying to prove but at least that would show that a consonantal
script would hide the differences enough so that both would be spelled
the same way.  And Hebrew, Aramaic, and Ugaritic are probably closer
if not the same "distance" apart as are German and English.  Indeed,
Hebrew "byt" vs. Aramaic "byt)", Moabite "bt", and Ugaritic "bt", Akkadian
"bitu", Phoenician "bt", Arabic "byt", or Hebrew "yyn" vs. Aramaic "yyn",
Samaritan Ostraca "yn", Ammonite "yn" and Ugaritic "yn" appears to be
differentiated only by a slight spelling difference.  In practice, there is a
great variation in how the vowels and consonants can be realized.  This
is one reason why it is simply wrong to assume that the "missing y in
masculine plurals" in epigraphic texts is indicative of similar spelling
because it sometimes is also missing in Biblical contexts.

In any case, using cognate evidence for phonetics is based on using
multiple words where the same correspondence can be seen between
phonemes that suggests development from a single phoneme.  If this is
done across a great variety of words, and across various cognate
languages, including some very basic words, we can make conclusions.
The fact that some words might sound the same and mean different
things is irrelevant because a great number of words is used and
because several cognate languages are used.  Maybe you can find some
pair of homonyms that sound the same in two languages but mean
different things and are etymologically unrelated, but if this is done
across several languages, the chances are slimmer and harder to
explain.  And the great number of words removes the dependence on
even that very slim chance.

And Karl, your personal experience notwithstanding, "townsmen"
adapting English words to an Hebrew context do fine without inventing
new letters.  Ze meod legitimi vepopulari, bimyuxad basleng.  What
prevents townsmen from adapting so the alphabet is that alphabet is
meanwhile also used for communication between two separate entities
or towns, and both those entities must understand the new letters.  If it's
just one town, what's the point?  The new letters must be readable by other
towns to be useful.

Genesis 1 is not that hard and an experienced reader can memorize it
in a few hours.  But if we use context we'd probably not pause properly
between "thw" and "wbhw". We probably have thousands if not much
more of examples of memorizing Genesis 1 in a few hours without
context just this past month.  And this is a reader that is doing it as a
part-time weekend pasttime, not someone whose entire occupation in
life is to memorize the Bible, which is a more accurate description of
the Massoretes.  And while patterns are used, the point is that there is
an extensive list of irregularities that are memorized for the Bible.
In Isaiah 53:3 they noted that )y$ym is found thrice, always full,
in the verses "nbzh wxdl / )l t+ lby ldbr r( / )lykm )y$ym )kr)".  They
also noted three words that appear once only and in this verse.  The
patterns that are used relate more to the word with its vocalization
itself than to the context.  That is, given a word spelled X, how would
I vocalize it?  Is it always vocalized the same, or are there
differences?  Your need to use the context for memorization is not
indicative of how the Massoretes memorized or how "authentic" Bible
reading is done.

In the end, while transliterations are problematic and while
cognate evidence is theory, your entire reconstruction is also theory.
It just doesn't convince anyone the way the cognate evidence and
transliterations do, because transliterations are data, and cognate
words are data, and the "cognate theory" is the best one that
explains the evidence, in almost everyone's view, even those who
are very deeply acquainted with all the linguistic evidence involved.
Your theory, on the other hand, depends on discarding the data and
not explaining it at all: "the Aramaic bilingual is only evidence for
Aramaic, not Hebrew", "Egyptian transliterations are transliterations
from Canaanite or cognate languages and are anyway mutilating the
original sounds," etc.  And this gives a strong feeling that your
theory is in fact at odds with the data, while the "cognate theory"
depends on the data.  In the end, good theories explain the data,
not propose how the data is to be ignored.

Yitzhak Sapir