Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Kevin:

On 1/10/07, Kevin Riley <klriley AT alphalink.com.au> wrote:
> Karl seems to want this discussion confined to pre-Exilic evidence.  The
> Amarna letters are the only evidence I know of - and Ugaritic if the longer
> alphabet includes shin and sin, as I believe it does.  As Karl excludes both
> because they are *not Hebrew*, we are left with no acceptable evidence.

Depends on what you consider as evidence.

All languages have words like XLQ which, though they have the same
pronunciation and sometimes even the same spelling, give from their
meanings clues that they have different roots. In this case, one root
referring to be smooth, the second to apportion. As a rule, they are
fairly rare.

However, there is no problem with differentiating XLP and XLC.

What I noticed is that the frequency of words where the sin / shin
differentiate roots is about as common as in the example of XLQ above,
and some of them listed in dictionaries have the same meanings and
usages.

In our numerically driven world, that observation can either be
verified or falsified by doing a statistical study, but no one has
done it. So at the moment it remains an observation, neither proven
nor falsified.

> Without some discovery of a manuscript/inscription that is pre-Exilic and
> includes a distinction of sin and shin, or a translation of names into a
> language that clearly differentiates /s/ and /S/, it is unlikely there will
> be evidence.  Otherwise it remains a matter of one person asserting that
> there was no distinction and another asserting there was.  That seems like a
> waste of time, IMO.
>
> Kevin Riley

What we are running into are different sets of presuppositions, some
of which give contradictory results. Many of these presuppositions are
just that, can neither be proven nor falsified by modern means and
surviving writings. So I agree with you that it is a waste of time to
try to argue it, which is why I read less than half of Yitzhak's
screed above. I start from a different set of presuppositions than
many, which has led me to question some of their assertions, one of
which is that the sin / shin split always was in Hebrew, while the
only aspect that can be tested has not been tested by anyone, we are
left with an observation that calls into question their
presuppositions with a rush to defend presuppositions, a waste of
time.

Karl W. Randolph.