Biblical Hebrew Forum

[rochelle altman <willaa AT netvision.net.il>]

Karl,

I did not state that BH as we have it shows all the forms.

I do know that the Paleo- frags among the DSS use variant forms.  I do know 
that the frags of the Tanakh among the DSS in formal Square Script display 
variants forms of  aleph, bet, sin/shin, and at least two vavs. These are 
frags, though, and we have no way of checking on other forms.but I think we 
should suspect that there were more in use.

I think that you are missing the point: These early Semitic scripts are not 
at all purely consonantal.alphabets. They are not abjads.

Corrupted? I know all about the influence of environment on a language. For 
example, how do you distinguish Aramacized Hebrew from Hebracized Aramaic. 
It's not an idle question. The papyri from Elephantine are said to be in 
Aramaic with Hebrew influence. Yet, they seem more to be Hebraicized 
Aramaic than Aramacized Hebrew.

You can't call that "corrupted." A living language changes; Hebrew was a 
living language at the period you are talking about. Oh, the orthography 
was modernized? Well, heck, yes. That's standard practice. Does that mean 
the original didn't exist? Of course not. After all, you need to have an 
earlier text in order to modernize the orthography. Does the original still 
shine through? Yup.

Hey, in spite of the Atticization of Homer, his Ionian dialect still comes 
through..Can't eliminate all the past without distorting the rhythms and 
meter, you know. Can't do it to the MT, either. And this is why the Psalms 
are so important to understanding BH. The Psalms preserve the older forms 
in spite of modernization of orthography.

For example, one question that's been floated out here is how far back does 
the use of ADONAI go? From the meter, well, it's used in pre-Monarchial 
psalms... so. I'd hazard 12th-11th-centuries BCE at the very least.

Further, all I have been asking someone to do is to make certain that the 
Hexapla shows no variant forms of upsilon. Then, what was Origen';s 
dialect? Do recall that the transcriptions will reflect a person's dialect. 
Homeric 'Yawones' (Ioninans) becomes Hebrew "yaVan" and Persian "yUann-"

So, transcription is a dubious guide. Even when we do know the dialect (was 
Origen's dialect Alexandrian?), all we can say is that _in that dialect_ 
VAV is transcribed as OU. It does not tell us what the pronunciation was 
back in Judea.

I have errands to run,have to go now.

Best regards,

Rochelle

> 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