Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Rochelle:

I wonder how you figure there were four different waws/vavs in
Biblical Hebrew? And that that would influence the different forms of
the WY[verb]? By Biblical Hebrew, I limit myself to the Hebrew spoken
and written prior to the Babylonian Captivity and by those who learned
Hebrew in a Hebrew context prior to their deportation such as Ezekiel
and Daniel, in other words before that Hebrew was influenced (or
corrupted) by contact with Aramaic.

Looking back at the Siloam Inscription, for example, there is no
epigraphic evidence that I notice indicating more than one waw/vav.

If the Hebrew was corrupted in its pronunciation, that would have
occurred during the Babylonian Captivity and within a few generations
of the return, in other words long before Origin's Hexapla, making his
evidence evidence of how it was pronounced in his day, not how it was
pronounced in Biblical times.

(I work among immigrant groups, and notice the corruption of the
language even among those who immigrated as small children as well as
those born here: they speak with a noticeable American accent when
they speak their parents' language. I expect the same progression of
the language among ancient Jews scattered among a sea of Aramaic
speaking people who used the same alphabet, that within a few
generations at most, the Hebrew they learned in school used the same
pronunciation for the letters as was used for Aramaic, not the
original Hebrew pronunciations.

Karl W. Randolph.

On 10/8/06, rochelle altman <willaa AT netvision.net.il> wrote:
> >
> >"In their /the Samaritn/ tradition, as in the second column of Origen´s
> >Hexapla, there was no morphological distinction between what we know as waw
> >consecutive and waw conjunctive. Neither of them caused gemination of the
> >following consonant in the imperfect."
>
> RISA:
> Again, has anyone examined the extant fragments of the Hexapla to determine
> if the
> form of the upsilon is the same in all cases?
>
> Do note that the Greek upsilon originally employed all *FOUR** forms of
> Phoenician VAV. to denote phonetic values of vocalic U' and ''W'.as well as
> consonantal voiced V and unvoiced 'F. The fourth form, representing the
> unvoiced consonantal value F, was later discarded as unnecessary because of
> the existence of phi/phe;. Centuries later the Atticists dubbed the
> unvoiced consonantal vav  'a digamma.'
>
> BTW, FOUR forms is correct. There are darned good reasons why I dislike
> referring to the VAV as WAW... the Phoenician writing system (and its
> borrowers) did distinguish among voiced and unvoiced consonantal and
> vocalic vavs!
>
> Excuse the pun, but I am beginning to wonder just who or what is imperfect
> if the distinctions between voiced and unvoiced and vocalic and
> consonantal  VAVs written into the documents are ignored. (And they are not
> the only multiple forms ignored.)
>
> The greatest irony of all this is that after 70 CE Hebrew writing systems
> began to standardize and eventually, over centuries, necessitated full
> vocalization notation while the Phoenician/Hebraic/Aramaic tradition was
> carried forth in the Christian writing systems.To this day,  the Romance
> and Germanic languages, for instance, use variant forms, only we dub them
> accents such as circumflex,grave, umlaut, etc..
>
>
> I have been enjoying this entire thread as it wiggled around.
>
> Thanks again,
>
> Rochelle