Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Ratson:

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 7:25 AM, Ratson Naharadama
<yahoo-arch AT heplist.com>wrote:

>
> Another example of this sound relationship between letters is the more
> English familiar T, D, TH (the TH sound of "thin" and "think"), and DH (the
> TH sound of "mother" and "that"). T and TH are both unvoiced while D and DH
> are voiced. TH and DH are fricative while T and D are stops/plosives. All 4
> of these sounds are pronounced from the same location in the mouth, they
> differ in whether they are voiced or not, or whether the tongue completely
> or only partially stops air flow at the spot of articulation.
>
>
The question comes down to, were the ancient Hebrews the originators, or the
adopters, of the 22 letter alphabet?

If they were the adopters, then dual or even triple sounds attached to one
grapheme makes sense, even as in your example concerning English above where
the early presses imported from the continent lacked the hand written
letters used in English to differentiate between t and th (tin and thin) and
d and th (Duh! and the). For a while early printers tried to use Y for th,
but later settled on th.

But if they were the originators, then that indicates that the 22 letters
referred to the recognized 22 consonantal phonemes in the language at that
time, that there was no ghayin nor shin/sin split nor multiple use letters
recognized by some theoreticians. Further, it would indicate that our
present understanding of the letters is based on native Aramaic speaking
peoples imposing Aramaicisms onto the written Hebrew text.

(Incidentally, the shibboleth story is differentiating between a samekh,
which I believe originally had an X sound (based on three sources) and a
sin.)

>
> --
> Ratson Naharädama
> Denver, Colorado
>
>
Karl W. Randolph.