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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Richard Steiner on Sin and Shin

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • To: K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Richard Steiner on Sin and Shin
  • Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 14:17:33 +0000

On 10/01/2007 13:49, K Randolph wrote:
...
The DSS are post when that change would already have occurred and
Ugarit is not Hebrew, nor the Amarna letters, and if the DSS are post
event, the Cairo Geniza even more so.

The DSS do include evidence that sin and shin were pronounced distinctly by the 1st century CE, which certainly has a bearing on your theory by restricting the date of the change you hypothesise. Ugaritic and the Amarna Letters give evidence for the separate pronunciation of sin and shin (well, I think they do, but I haven't checked) in languages closely related to Hebrew at an earlier time, and disprove one older version of your hypothesis according to which sin and shin were not separate in any Semitic languages until a late date.

The only "evidence" that I know of that contradicts the teaching that
Hebrew had ceased to be the language learned at one's mother's knee
within a couple of generations of the Babylonian Captivity is the
Documentary Hypothesis, which I think is a bunch of hooey. ...

Agreed. But I don't want to discuss this now.

... Not worth
the paper it is written on. If one ignores the Documentary Hypothesis,
then the patterns of language use already in Tanakh give indications
that post Babylonian Captivity, Hebrew for all practical
considerations, had ceased to be the language spoken at the hearth and
market, though still spoken as the language of literature, religion
and government, thus it is very unlikely that its pronunciation had
not been changed to conform to the pronunciation of the same letters
in the Aramaic of that time. That would include making a sin / shin
split where none had existed before.

I don't accept your view that Hebrew had already ceased to be a commonly spoken language. But suppose it had? Why did the split happen in the way you claim? Why did shin/sin become shin in most Hebrew words, but change to sin in a minority but including a few very common verbs like (&H and &YM/&WM? You can hardly claim that this is down to Aramaic influence, because (&H is not found in Aramaic. How do you explain that (#R "ten" became (&R to match Aramaic, but (#R "rich" became ($R when the Aramaic is (TR? This is a clear case of a semantic distinction between sin and shin, to add to the long list which you reject while you cling to your much shorter list of supposed semantically identical words.

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





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