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

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  • From: "Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Richard Steiner on Sin and Shin
  • Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 22:17:43 +0000

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




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