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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] bgdkpt (was: About Dagesh's)

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  • From: Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] bgdkpt (was: About Dagesh's)
  • Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2008 11:04:36 +0300

Although not properly a linguist, I would like to point out that "Proto-Semitic" is nothing but a scholarly construction, which, while it serves as a useful model, probably never sounded anything like that model. I'd also point out that before the inverntion of writing, and probably until the invention of the alphbet, there was probably much more "fluidity" in the connection between the pronounciation of specific sounds (phonemes) and their meaning. In other words, we think that we know the "proper" spelling of a word, and that changing that spelling changes its meaning. But before there was "spelling", meaning was probably much more connected to context.

Does that make sense?

Yigal Levin
----- Original Message ----- From: "Yaakov Stein" <yaakov_s AT rad.com>
To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2008 10:47 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] bgdkpt (was: About Dagesh's)


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






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