Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Jason:

Personally I suspect that when the Phoenicians learned the Hebrew alphabet,
that they did so without changing any of the sounds. They were able to do so
because they spoke a cognate language, Then when the Greeks learned it from
the Phoenicians, they changed some of the letters to vowels. But I think the
consonants they accepted, they accepted without change.

So looking at the shape and position of tet in the Hebrew alphabet, and
because I suspect that Hebrew was originally a consonant/vowel language, I
suspect that the original pronunciation of the letter in Hebrew was "theta"
or something very similar. Similarly the samech was originally pronounced
like an "X", hence "xameke". Many languages made a difference in
pronunciation between a K and Q, and some modern languages still seem to
have such a distinction. And I think waw was originally pronounced as an
English W. And there were no differences between aspirated and nonaspirated
consonants in ancient times, that came after the Babylonian exile.

But back to the proposed transliteration scheme, we must insist that the
consonants be written as capitals, and those with a second letter, the
second letter miniscule, e.g. Ts. If you want to show dots, double the
consonants for dagesh, and have the vowels miniscule. As long as that rule
is followed, it should be workable.

Personally, I find that the present system workable, as long as one sticks
to consonants only. But when vowels are added, especially when they are
written as capitals, I find it unworkable, confusing, and I run to my Hebrew
Bible.

Just my 2¢.

Karl W. Randolph.

On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 1:53 AM, Jason Hare <jaihare AT gmail.com> wrote:

> So, you've got
> tet = th
> thaw (that is, tav without dagesh) = th
>
> How can ת be represented in its soft form the same as ט? I just don't
> get the fact that two different people have suggested this, as if
> there were a SOFT nature to tet, which is actually an emphatic
> consonant, corresponding to the Arabic ط rather than the aspirated ث
> (corresponding to ת) or the non-aspirated ت (corresponding to תּ). How
> can emphatic ט be represented in transcription as aspirated th?
>
> Additionally, all of these suggestions for using h in the soft
> consonant forms would really just lend to the confusion of actual heh
> ה within words. How do we present הבהיר in these consonants? "hbhhyr"
> - What a mess! It's so much clearer to see HBHYR as
> heh-bet-heh-yod-resh.
>
> Again, I'm all for keeping the "standard" as it is. It's just clearer.
>
> Jason Hare