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

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  • From: "K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
  • To: "B Hebrew" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Richard Steiner on Sin and Shin
  • Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2007 00:35:22 -0800

Dear Peter et al.:

At first I questioned (privately) whether or not this study would be
accurate. I needn't have worried.

On 1/11/07, Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org> wrote:
On 11/01/2007 19:13, Peter Kirk wrote:
> ...
> Given the morphological database, it would actually be rather trivial to
> discover the proportions of homonyms for each letter, among three letter
> verbal roots attested in the Hebrew Bible. I may even do this!
>
>
I have just done a simple study of the percentage of homonyms among
biblical Hebrew verb roots (triliteral only, Aramaic excluded). This is
based on the Westminster morphological database - only on the existence
of the root, not at all on its frequency. .....

Conclusion: This approach doesn't help one way or the other. It
certainly doesn't prove Karl's hypothesis. Nor does it disprove it.

...

Do I get a master's degree for this, about an hour's work (since I had
the basic database set up already)?

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


Probably not a master's degree, but maybe the basis of an article.

While I did not expect the study to prove my hypothesis that the sin
and shin were originally one phoneme, it has the potential to disprove
it. So far it hasn't.

For a long time I accepted without question that sin and shin were
separate letters. After all, the experts told me so. I was puzzled by
Psalm 119 and similar poetry, but didn't dwell on it.

It was when I digitized my notes from dictionary margins that I was
struck by how seldom the sin and shin appeared in homonyms, as seldom
as if they originally were one phoneme, not two as I had been taught.
That's when I started to question my teachers. Only afterwards did I
consider the alphabetic psalms and other observations as maybe forming
a pattern pointing to the possibility that sin and shin were one
phoneme. This study backed up that observation. Of course, this is
just a first step.

Karl W. Randolph.




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