Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On 1/10/07, Peter Kirk wrote:

> 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.

No, Ugaritic does not distinguish Shin and Sin, and in fact, neither does
Samaritan.  Shlomo Izreel's "Canaano-Akkadian" notes that Amarna
scribes in 14th century BCE Jerusalem, distinguished between Canaanite
/s'/ and /$/ "by using two distinct sets of syllabograms for each; the first 
set
is used also for representing local /th/:
$A-de4-e /s'ade:/ 'field' (EA 287:56, Canaanite Gloss)
$A-ak-mi /thakmi/ 'Shechem' (EA 289:23)
u'-ru-SA-lim /uru$alim/ 'Jerusalem' (EA 287:25)

Yitzhak Sapir