Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yaakov Stein" <yaakov_s AT rad.com>]

Yitzhak 

> The modern inventory of Proto-Semitic sounds is as follows ...

This is not very different from Rabin's table. In fact, he references
various possibilities including the ones you mention, and rejects
several of them.
In any case, my point in bringing this up was that although in
proto-Semitic
there were triplets, interchanging the consonants from the triplets
did change the meaning of the word. This is NOT the case for bgdkpt.
(Of course our friend Isaac will probably add that some of these
changes might have only "somewhat" changed the meaning.)


> Some of these sounds remained in use for a long time.  
> See Steiner's article here:
http://sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/JBL1242.pdf

Yes, I have seen this already, and think it is very interesting.
However, it refers to two specific changes that are much later than
what I was talking about. 
(Similarly, one could study the loss of differentiation between het and
chaf, 
or ayin and aleph in modern Hebrew.)


> On bgdkpt, the following remarks are also worthwhile: ...

Thanks for the pointers. I will go through them.

> As for your comments regarding Hurrian, Hurrian does not have a bgdkpt
rule.  It has a different rule: ...
You mention that in your opinion Rabin is dated material.
Is that also the case for Speiser ? Although the articles in which he
proposes that Hebrew and Aramaic
borrowed the bgdkpt phenomenon from Hurrian are from 1939 and his book
is from 1941,
I could not find a more recent book on Hurrian language than his. 

If I understood correctly, your information on Hurrian obstruents is a
quote. Can I ask from what ?

>  On the issue of Nuzi law, see Victor Avigdor Hurowitz, "Expelling the
Bible from the Biblical Period," in "The Controversy over the Bible" ed.
Levine and Mazar (Hebrew, ??????? ?? ???? ???????? ?????).
Specifically, p. 48.

Thanks. I'll look it up.

Yaakov (J) Stein