Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 2/1/06, Karl Randolph wrote:

> I will close with what I have said all along, that I am not
> 100% convinced that Biblical Hebrew was a CV
> language, rather I am throwing this out as a discussion.
> But I'm not finding convincing arguments against the
> proposition either.

Karl, you have yet to raise convincing arguments for the
proposition.  You also seem (from the discussion) to have
a faulty understanding of Modern Hebrew and misconceptions
about how it is pronounced.

Just as an example, you mentioned:
> But if they have only hard sounds, then there are many
> words that would be impossible to pronounce without an
> intervening vowel. Other evidences include letters like
> eyin and alep, in order to be recognizable, would have
> had to end with a vowel sound.

I raised various questions on these statements that were
additionally backed up by others on the list.  As regarding
the non-vowel Aleph, it occurred to me that words like Ro'$
and Co'n are probably "segholates" derived from "ra'$" and
"ca'n" where the short a vowel under the influence of the
aleph became a long a vowel, and we can see this in
Arabic and Aramaic while in Hebrew as in other Canaanite
languages, there was the long a -> o change.  A similar
"long a"-glottal stop is (I think) in the way most Modern
Hebrew speakers pronounce the word "$ma(tem" (you all
heard) where the Ayin is replaced by a glottal stop, and
even though it has no vowel afterwards it is still noticeable.

So it seems your theory is based on misconceptions, about
Modern Hebrew and linguistics in general, that you have not
yet bothered to answer or correct and we have no reason to
think that your theory is correct.  After you clear up the
misconceptions, you can set out to prove your theory.  But
you will need to provide evidence, not just sit by arguing that
you don't like evidence for the generally accepted theory for
any particular reason.  (And try not to bring up Mosaic
authorship of the Torah as one of those reasons this time).

Yitzhak Sapir