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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] comparative historical linguistics was Re: Nun-Tav-Vet root

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • To: K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: B-Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] comparative historical linguistics was Re: Nun-Tav-Vet root
  • Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2006 11:00:56 +0000

On 25/11/2006 06:33, K Randolph wrote:
...
In West Semitic, but we are discussing Biblical Hebrew, and the
evidence indicates that sin and shin were one letter with one
pronunciation in Biblical times.

Well, if you accept that sin and shin were separate in West Semitic, but insist that they were one letter in biblical Hebrew, let's see what that implies. It must be one of the following:

1. Biblical Hebrew is not related to West Semitic, despite that fact that you can read and understand West Semitic (Phoenician); I can't believe that even you insist on that.

2. Biblical Hebrew has a common ancestor with West Semitic in which sin and shin were distinct (this is the normal scholarly position), and West Semitic preserved the distinction, whereas biblical Hebrew lost the distinction, but it reappeared later, before the time of the Masoretes.

3. Biblical Hebrew has a common ancestor with West Semitic in which sin and shin were not distinct; West Semitic innovated the distinction in ancient times, and Hebrew separately innovated the distinction in post-biblical times, before the time of the Masoretes.

The problem with both 2. and 3. (and all the more so with 1.) is that biblical Hebrew seems to distinguish sin and shin in exactly the same places as ancient West Semitic. How do you account for that? I suppose it is just possible that this came about because of Aramaic influence. But surely it is more probable that the distinction was in fact already present in biblical Hebrew, although not clearly distinguished in writing.

As for the supposed evidence "that sin and shin were one letter with one pronunciation in Biblical times", I suspect that &YM "put" and $M "there" are "false friends" with no real etymological link despite their (slightly) similar meanings. Anyway on your hypothesis you need to explain how these two split apart when their meanings were similar. You also refer to "the paucity of roots differentiated by shin and sin, as rare as what is expected if they originally were one letter, not two". But is this actually true? Just looking at words (not roots, verbs written unpointed) starting with sin or shin, we have the following pairs:

$B( / &B(
$BR / &BR
$GG / &GG
$GH / &GH
$DD / &DD
$WX / &WX
$W+ / &W+
$WR / &WR
$XH / &XH
$X+ / &X+
$XQ / &XQ
$YX, $IYXFH / &YX, $IYXFH
$KK / &KK
$KL / &KL
$KR / &KR
$N) / &N)
$(R, $A(AR / &(R, &A(AR
$QD / &QD
$QR / &QR
$RH, $FRFH / &RH, &FRFH
$RR / &RR

Now I accept that there are many roots in biblical Hebrew which are homonyms (although most of these are easily explainable by hypothesising loss of phonemes from earlier forms of the language), also that some of the pairs I have listed may not be clearly semantically distinct (I haven't looked at definitions, only a list of lemmas). But your hypothesis would have to explain not only why there are so many of these pairs but also how they came to split apart in a consistent way when (on your hypothesis) sin and shin split apart.

I note also the extreme rarity of words starting with sin - lamed, which to me is most easily explained by avoidance of two lateral sounds together, thus strongly suggesting that sin had some kind of lateral sound at the time when sin and shin were distinguished.
...
Here the distinction between language and dialect is really fuzzy.
Among modern languages, for example, Swedish and Norwegian are so
close that one speaking one can usually understand a person speaking
the other, yet they are called different languages, But Mülheiserisch,
a subset of Allamanisch spoken near Heidelberg, and Toi San Wah, two
"dialects" I have had to deal with, are so different from their main
languages, German and Cantonese, that they cannot be understood by
speakers of the main languages.

Indeed, you are making the same point as me here. Perhaps Hebrew and Phoenician are rather like Swedish and Norwegian, languages of different people who wanted separate identities but nevertheless very similar and mutually comprehensible.

...
Here the distinction is between an alphabet devised for a language, vs
one adopted from another language. For example, if I were to devise an
alphabet for modern English with its 46 or thereabouts recognized
phonemes, I would make it have 46 letters, one letter per phoneme.
Instead we use an alphabet adopted from Latin that fits poorly. It is
like the difference between a tailor made suit compared to one off the
rack that can be worn but doesn't fit.

OK, I take your point. But in fact the major reason why alphabets don't fit modern languages well is that languages have changed. French was mentioned earlier. The original Latin alphabet was significantly modified for French (added accented vowels and c cedilla, dropped consonants) and probably fitted quite well with French as spoken at the time of the adaptation. But French pronunciation has changed quite severely while the alphabet and spelling have remained fixed. As a result the French alphabet is now a rather poor fit for spoken French. And much the same is true of English: the modifications to the Latin alphabet made for English (added "j" and "w", "u" and "v" distinguished) were less, so that in the 16th century spelling was not completely phonetic, but it was in fact much more phonetic than it is now.

Now the question is: was the 22 letter alphabet tailor made for
Biblical Hebrew, or was it adopted from another language? One way to
answer that is to answer who had that alphabet first?

We see from ancient graffiti and inscriptions that southern Arabian
languages' alphabets shared a similar root as Biblical Hebrew but had
a different set of letters, corresponding to their different number of
phonemes while many of the letters are shared. I suspect that the Wadi
al Hol graffiti were southern Arabian, not equivalent to Hebrew.

Unlikely. It is known that the Egyptians had close contacts with Canaan and that the many Semites living in Egypt at that time were largely from Canaan. Egyptian links with south Arabia, i.e. modern Yemen and Oman, were much more obscure. Meanwhile the letter shapes of the earliest surviving inscriptions from Canaan strongly suggest derivation from Egyptian hieroglyphs, and so that they were derived in a similar way to the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions if not provably directly linked.

While the ancient Phoenicians were far more prolific in their graffiti
and stone inscriptions than Hebrew writers, there is evidence that
their use of the 22 letter alphabet was adopted from Hebrew instead of
the other way around. Their widespread use dates from about the time
of King David and they use a cursive from about that time. Hebrew was
historically credited with having the alphabet from centuries earlier,
but written on scrolls that have not survived.

Because Moses' use of writing dates from about the same time as the
earliest attested use of a similar alphabet among southern Arabian but
with 22 letters instead of the more numerous but mostly shared letters
found among southern Arabians, that indicates that the 22 letters
corresponded to 22 recognized consonantal phonemes of Biblical Hebrew.
In other words, that the alphabet was developed, i.e. tailor made, for
Biblical Hebrew.

Of course even if we grant that Moses wrote down the Torah, we don't know that he wrote it in anything like the 22 letter script that we know today. It may originally have been written with more (or fewer) letter distinctions and later copied into the alphabet used later. But even if we grant that the Torah is the oldest surviving document in the 22 letter script, that by no means implies that it was the first such document. It may well be that the 22 letter script had become widespread among the Semites in Egypt at the period (but using perishable writing materials) and was based on a phonetically simplified form of NW Semitic used as a kind of trade language between the different Semitic groups, while the Hebrews and maybe other such groups kept their own phonetically more rich versions. You may find similar things happening among modern Germanic dialects, which may well be phonetically richer than standard German etc; it is also true of English dialects e.g. Scots retains the [x] sound and phoneme e.g. in "loch" which is missing from standard English.


...
Some people can, some people can't, and some people can be taught how
to. As such, it invalidates what follows.


Do you have evidence that any people (other than those with specific
hearing, learning or speaking disabilities) are unable to learn to
pronounce any phonemes which are found in any language? ...
... In general phoneticians have shown that anyone
can be taught to make any sound found in any human language, although
sometimes this is a difficult process. Do you have any evidence to the
contrary?

No, what I mention is what I heard from phoneticians, namely that
normal children can learn all phones used in all languages. However,
languages use as phonemes only a small subset of possible phones.

One complicating factor is that at about the age of 14, as a matter
or maturation, the phones and phonemes used in a person's native
language become hard wired, as it were, in a person's brain, after
which time it is often very difficult even to recognize phones and
phonemes from other languages. The main exceptions are those children
who are exposed to multiple languages around that age and before.
Linguists have to be trained to recognize phones and phonemes from
outside their native tongue.

Yes, linguists and language learners have to be trained to recognise and produce phones from previously unfamiliar languages, and after a certain age this becomes more difficult. Like learning Hebrew, it is difficult, but not impossible. That is why I reject your "some people can't", unless because of specific disability.

--
Peter Kirk
E-mail: peter AT qaya.org
Blog: http://speakertruth.blogspot.com/
Website: http://www.qaya.org/





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