Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Yitzhak:

Did any of these authors who claimed that the sin/shin distinction in
Biblical Hebrew was the result of Aramaic influence mention that there
are several words sometimes written with a sin, sometimes with a shin,
but otherwise having the same meaning? That is not counting the roots
where one derivative is written with a sin and another a shin?

I take the existence of both situations as mentioned in the above
paragraph as evidences that prior to the Babylonian Exile, that sin
and shin were the same letter within Biblical Hebrew.

That the sin/shin split was already evident in the DSS I take as
evidence that Hebrew had ceased to be a native language by the end of
the Babylonian Captivity, but continued on as the language of
government, religion and high art, hence it was still a living
language, in the same way as Latin is still a living, developing
language even though no one has spoken it for over 1500 years as a
native tongue.

Karl W. Randolph.