Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 5:39 AM, Jim Stinehart wrote:
> Yitzhak Sapir:
>
> If, in the second millennium BCE, "samekh was pronounced as an affricate
> [ts]", then how was ssade pronounced at that time?  How close to the sound
> of a sin or shin was a ssade at that time?

Sade is a letter used in NWS inscriptions to identify any of several emphatic
variants of dentals.  In this diagram (Huehnergard's article on Afro-asiatic):
http://books.google.com/books?id=vTrT-bZyuPcC&pg=PP6
we see all of these as [ts'], [ɬ'], and [θ'].  In Aramaic  these all
remained distinct
into the 1st millennium BCE.  In Hebrew some or all of them may have merged
together into a single consonant.  However, they were all emphatic, and they
remained emphatic even to this day in oriental communities.  Emphatic may
mean any of various types of realizations, but in Central Semitic (the 
language
family that includes Arabic, Aramaic and Hebrew), emphatic probably means
pharyngealized.  See Faber's article in Hetzron's The Semitic Languages, p. 8:
http://books.google.com/books?id=nbUOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA8
Anyway, for Semitic languages those sounds were distinct and were not
confused with one another.  In the case of Sade vs. Shin, there were multiple
phonetic differences, and in the case of Sade vs. Sin, there might have been
only one (unless the lateral Sade [ɬ'] had merged with the other consonants).
In all cases, the emphatic vs non-emphatic realization meant that they would
not be confused with one another.  Just like you wouldn't confuse dome and
tome ([d] vs [t]) or gore and core ([g] vs [k]), Shin/Sin and Sade would not
be confused.

Yitzhak Sapir