Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 2/9/06, Peter Kirk wrote:

> You misunderstand me. I was not referring to cases like qtl, qwtl and
> qtwl, which in modern Hebrew are clearly different words (different
> forms of the same verb) with different pronunciations. I was referring
> to cases, which I know do occur in modern Hebrew as well as in biblical
> and probably inscriptional, where the same word with the same meaning is
> spelled in different ways e.g. by different authors - but without
> implying a different pronunciation. Similarly "liue" and "live" in a
> Shakespeare text (from the two versions of Romeo and Juliet you linked
> to), and "colour" and "color" in modern English, are pronounced the same
> despite the variant spelling conventions.

Read again the section from the Cambridge History of American and English
Literature that I linked to earlier in the discussion.  It directly
contradicts what
you just said: "But, if a chapter from The Authorised Version or a scene from
one of Shakespeare's plays were read to us with the contemporary
pronunciation, the ear would be considerably puzzled to recognise certain of
the words."  Perhaps the words you cite remained the same, but at least
"colour"'s spelling/pronunciation may be related to the GVS -- so that the
variant spelling convention does indicate an attempt to modernize after a
sound change.

> there is indeed a possibility of a pronunciation difference (but then there 
> is
> that even if the spelling is unchanged) but also a very good chance that
> the pronunciation was unchanged.

How do you measure this "good chance"?  Or is it just a possibility that you
would like to think is a good chance?

> I don't entirely follow you here. But I suppose my point is that it is
> possible to make the "reasonable reconstruction" you mention without
> hypothesising any changes of pronunciation between inscriptional Hebrew
> and the language of the Torah, only a change in spelling conventions.
> Now very likely there was at least some difference between how the
> writers of the inscriptions pronounced their texts and how the writers
> of the Torah pronounced theirs (whether differences in time or only of
> dialect). But as the spelling differences can be explained apart from
> pronunciation differences, we are left with no convincing evidence
> concerning any supposed pronunciation differences.

I noted that the spelling may be displaced in time as regarding the
actual pronunciation.  But then, it's just similarly possible that the
spelling remained constant and pronunciation changed (such as in
Sin/shin, of which an example is somewhere in Leviticus, I think).
Since sound changes happen all the time, and the spelling discloses
that there was most likely a difference in time between the spelling
convention of pre-exilic inscriptions and of the Bible in its current
consonantal spelling, we could similarly theorize that the
pronunciation changed, simply because it always does over time
(to varying degrees, of course).  We have variant spellings of "day"
in the inscriptions: ym and ywm.  Under such circumstances, we
might expect that final -o or -aw, even if written with an -h, might
sometimes be written as an -w by a less skilled scribe.  But it's
pretty widely agreed that it isn't.  So if you want to say that spelling
is simply not a good indicator of pronunciation ever, and we can't
learn much about pronunciation from spelling, because the spelling
may hide innovations, you will be left with the simple conclusion
that there probably were sound changes between the stage
represented by pre-exilic inscriptions and the stage represented by
the Massoretic Text, but we simply can't figure out what they were.

> I do not want to support Karl's arguments. You have seen my
> responses to him.

But it's important to look at my arguments in context to his
assertion.

> > But you don't know how they were spelled in pre-exilic times.
> > So how can it be proof that -h in pre-exilic times was used for
> > -o^ ?  This is a good example of how spelling in the Hebrew
> > Bible cannot teach us about pre-exilic conventions.

> No, I can't be sure. But, although we have little evidence of how
> pronunciation changed, if at all, we do have reasonable evidence of how
> spelling changed. This would make it extremely unlikely that Shlomo and
> Shilo were spelled with final vav, or with no final letter, before the
> exile. Well, perhaps there is a little circular reasoning there.

It's not just a little circular.

> But are there examples of word final vav for any vowel in inscriptional
> Hebrew? If not, we have to assume either that there are no words
> ending in -o in inscriptional Hebrew, which is rather unlikely given
> how common they are in later Hebrew, or else that they were spelled
> with final he.

Or that they were not spelled with any letter in the end.  That is, that
-o was simply not written in the pre-exilic inscriptions.  In any case,
beyond the common cases of masculine possessive forms, what
other cases can you think of?  I tried to think of other examples but
right now, they don't come to mind, and you say that they are very
common.

> > I don't know how well we know that -h can represent -o^, and
> > whether it is not based on the assumption that -h in pre-exilic
> > inscriptions was pronounced -o^ rather than as a consonant.
> > Sarfatti specifically mentions that -h came to represent -o^
> > because the above change (-ahu > -au > -o^) was not reflected
> > in the orthography.
>
> This seems improbable to me unless some explanation can be given for how
> -h came to represent -a and -e. The simplest hypothesis is that -h was
> first written as a mater lectionis for any final vowel, or at least for
> -a, -e and -o. The suggestion that its use for -o came about by a quite
> different mechanism from its use for -a and -e is improbable by Occam's
> Razor.

My impression, based on the similar use of the variant "he"-based sign for
feminine words in Arabic, is that -ah was originally consonantal as well, or
else why would Arabic not base its variant on the Alef?  Note also the use
of final Alef in various names of Biblical persons from pre-exilic times that
are transliterated in foreign inscriptions with an -a.  This leaves us with -h
for -e only, and while I'm not sure right now how widely this is used, it
cannot be used to claim that -h was the default "final vowel" indicator.

> > Well, maybe it is translation but instead of into Modern English
> > -- into a literary construct?

> I would not call a change in spelling conventions a translation at all,
> for there is no change in the spoken form.

Read again the article in the Cambridge History.

> > And we are not talking about consistent widespread modernization
> > of the language.  For the issue under discussion, it's sufficient that
> > only in some obscure words did modernization take place in the
> > Bible.

> This is possible. But maybe you are confused about what the issue is.
> Substitution of a few obscure words is a quite independent process from
> large scale change in pronunciation.

It's one more indication of the passage of time.  That the different
spelling convention is later and is part of a whole bunch of changes
that reflected that passage in time.  One of those changes would
be pronunciation.

> I agree that the version with the original spelling would be the more
> helpful for studying 16th century English. But even if we had only the
> orthographically modernised version to work with, as with the Torah, we
> could learn a lot about 16th century English and how it differed from
> modern English, especially in grammar and lexicon although not so
> clearly in pronunciation.

True.  But first, as the title of this thread still indicates, the 
pronunciation
was the main issue.  Also, what we could learn of pronunciation is
mainly through examination of rhymes -- that is, indirectly.

> My point about the loan words was not that they are a parallel with the
> Hebrew but to correct your error that Shakespeare would have pronounced
> "Iuliet" with an initial I or Y sound, rather than J.

When did I ever say that?

> That's not what I was saying. What I was suggesting was that pre-exilic
> Hebrew, like almost any language, was not monolithic in its lexicon or
> orthography, and so one would expect some variation between different
> sources and different registers of language without interpreting this
> variation as necessary evidence that they were composed at different times.

What it means, though, is that you accept that the epigraphic evidence
suggests 1) different spelling convention and 2) probably a slightly
different lexicon.  In essence, that the evidence does imply what I am
saying.  All you are saying is that perhaps there are reasons why we
should ignore this evidence -- for example, dialectical differences which
would require us to look at each inscription separately from all others.
Even if we found a whole library of late pre-exilic documents, this
wouldn't prove anything because perhaps there were dialectical
differences between this library and the Hebrew Bible that were in
existence already in this time.  Well, yes, perhaps, but now your
position is one of saying that the evidence says one thing but you
say another, and that's not a very good position on which to stand.

Yitzhak Sapir