Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 1/4/07, K Randolph wrote:
> 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?

The real problem that you have here is arguing that these roots are
really sometimes this way sometimes the other way.  Can you find
examples of stock phrases? (such as opening a letter with the word
"$lwm" but which sometimes appears with a sin)  Perhaps you try
to assign them the same meaning despite their meaning being
distinct?  One way to test this is to see if the cognates which have
regular patterns in the various languages, maintain the distinctions
in different languages.

However, as for the authors themselves, I wouldn't know.  Most of them
are in German, which I can't read.

> 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.

You take the "existence of both situations" as a given assumption, and
you allow nothing to disprove your own interpretations of these words.
That is really the problem and the difference between your statement of
the theory and these scholars'.  For them, every assumption must be
proven.

Yitzhak Sapir