Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

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.