Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Yitzhak:

As usual, you have things backwards.

On 1/6/07, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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

First of all, I was taught that sin and shin were two letters. It was
only later, as I was reading through Tanakh that I noticed problems
with the theory as I was taught it. In other words, if you had come to
me 20 years ago, I would have agreed with you. But now I don't.

The first problem I noticed is the lack of words where sin and shin
denote a difference in meaning. In all languages, there are a few
words which have the same pronunciation, but where roots have
converged in pronunciation, loan words share a pronunciation with
another word, and so forth, the well known example that the English
pronunciation "tu" refers to three different roots, to, too, two, and
if they were spelled phonetically, they would share the same spelling.
But in Hebrew, there are only a few roots where the sin or shin denote
differences in meaning, about the same percentage of uses as for words
that have the same pronunciation without a sin or shin present. If the
sin and shin were separate letters all along, theory says there should
be many more examples, but they are not there. Sin and shin together
are the most common letter in Biblical Hebrew.

Secondly, looking at meaning, I noticed words where the only thing
that would indicate that two different words did not come from the
same root was that one was with a sin, the other with a shin. The
example I have given is &YM to place and $M that place, there, their
meanings pointing to a common origin, common root. I have noticed
other examples as well, only that I have not made an organized study
of the phenomenon prevents me from having an organized list of such.

Thirdly, I noticed some words where the same meaning is sometimes
spelled with a sin, sometimes with a shin. If they originally were two
letters, that shouldn't be found.

After having made these observations, I then go back and look at the
theory that sin and shin were always separate letters, and say that
these observations show that there is a problem with that theory. In
fact, the data seem to show that they were originally one letter that
was later split into two.

What comes first: data or theory? I say data. What do you say?

Karl W. Randolph.