Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Jason Hare <jaihare AT gmail.com>]

Similar to the way that Arabic has ayin ع and ghayin غ. It's entirely
possible that ayin ע in Hebrew represents the merging of two distinct
sounds that eventually became one. Perhaps in some words it was a
tradition to maintain the original sound. Notice that "Gaza" is עזה in
Hebrew (with the letter ayin) and غزة in Arabic (with the letter
ghayin). This ghayin sound doesn't have a separate pronunciation in
Hebrew.

What I would be curious about, though, is the difference between the
ghayin that we find in Arabic and the gimel ג without dagesh in
ancient Hebrew. I thought that it was said that the gimel had a
softened form. What would the difference have been between that and
the ghayin?

Regards,
Jason Hare
Rehovot, Israel

On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 10:08 PM, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:
> Mark:
> You have leapt feet first into a debate where speculation outweighs solid
> evidence.
>
> One thing that seems pretty certain is that the pronunciation of the ayin
> was different from that of the alep during Biblical times.
>
> Other people speculate that the ayin is a combination of two letters written
> with one grapheme, one of which had a soft “g” sound. Right now that is the
> majority belief of Hebrew scholars.
>
> My 2¢—I suspect that the ayin originally was a hard glottal stop that was
> either sometimes mistaken for a soft “g” sound, or in some dialectal
> pronunciations may actually have had a soft “g” sound. Hence the LXX “Gaza”.
>
> Karl W. Randolph.