Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 03/02/2006 10:27, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
> ...
>
> No one agrees that "Biblical Hebrew" was spoken
> before the Babylonian Exile.  Practically all philologists
> agree that Biblical Hebrew as it is spelled today in the
> Bible represents a stage not earlier than the Persian
> period.  This means that any documents in an earlier
> form of Hebrew were updated at least in spelling but
> also possibly in vocabulary, sentence structure, we
> don't know.  From the little inscriptions we have, it
> appears that perhaps a very similar form of Hebrew
> (what is known as  "Classical Hebrew" or "Standard
> Hebrew") was being spoken 800 BCE - 600 BCE in
> Judea.  That doesn't change the fact that "Biblical
> Hebrew" if referencing the consonantal text only refers
> to the Hebrew spoken in the Persian period.
>
>   
Well, we can only speculate about what was spoken. But if we look at the 
written consonantal text, we find very little difference (apart from 
letter shapes) between much of the biblical text (excluding the 
post-exilic "late biblical Hebrew" parts) and pre-exilic inscriptional 
Hebrew. There is simply not enough evidence that these were actually 
different languages, and so to make a hard distinction between 
pre-exilic and biblical Hebrew.

But this is not to suggest that the Masoretic vocalisation and 
pronunciation also applied before the exile, it almost certainly did not.

...
> First, what you cannot pronounce is not something that
> someone else may not be able to.  Ancient Hebrew was
> unable to represent unvocalized -n- and so the -n-
> consistently assimilated to the following consonant even
> in borrowed words.  But you can pronounce it (note: "nc" in
> "pronounce").  There could very well and probably are sounds
> that you cannot pronounce but Ancient Hebrew could.
>   

In Spanish word initial "sp" is considered unpronounceable, hence 
"España", but we have no problem in English, "Spain". In London English, 
words end with a glottal stop and are distinguishable from the same word 
without a glottal stop, compare "not", with the "t" pronounced as a 
glottal, with "no".

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/