Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

James:

On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 6:05 AM, James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk> wrote:

> In English we commit absolute atrocities and somehow manage to
> convince ourselves that a particular letter is the same sound.
>
> This comes down to phonemic verses phonic use of sounds. They are different
in different languages.


> Consider, for example the 'th' sound. Is it one sound? Are you
> absolutely sure about that? Now say 'thought'. Now say 'the'. Still
> convinced they are the same sound? Say them again but this time listen
> to yourself very, very carefully. The beginning 'th' sounds are
> different and produce different speech signals when analysed with a
> fourier free transform. One is a fricative version of the other.
>
> This is a bad example, as historically they were recognized as different
phonemes, written with different symbols. The aspirated “th” was originally
written with a thorn ‘þ’ taken over from the Germanic runes, while the
voiced with a crossed “D” ‘Ðð’. It was the widespread adoption of printing
presses made on the continent which lacked those symbols that caused the two
eventually to be written as “th”.


> What about the letter 'l'? Now say 'label'. Is the first 'l' the same
> as the last 'l'? Are you absolutely sure? Listen very carefully
> because this one is a more subtle difference.
>
> This is a better example, as both the dental and palatal ‘l’s are
considered the same phoneme in English, while it is my understanding that in
the Slavic languages they are different phonemes. To make it more
interesting, there are dialectal differences within English that are not
recognized because they are considered the same phoneme.


> In short, what are completely different sounds are often categorised
> by listeners as the same sound merely because the alphabet tells them
> it is the same sound. This does not stop them from spotting that a non
> fricative pronunciation of 'the' somehow sounds funny though.
>
> James Christian
>

Now we come to Hebrew: the earliest data concerning pronunciation comes
centuries after the last person we can positively prove spoke Hebrew as a
native language (learned at his mother’s knee). How much did the Aramaic
pronunciation of the Hebrew alphabet (Hebrews used it before the
Phoenicians) which was learned during the Babylonian Exile affect later
pronunciation of Hebrew? How much further change in pronunciation was there
that was masked by consistency in spelling, consistency written to preserve
the Bible? Then we come to the Greeks centuries later in the LXX, and even
more questions? Then centuries later with the Masoretes with even a
different though similar tradition?

So what was the original pronunciation of Hebrew? It is my personal belief
that the letters were all hard and that there were no matres lectionis in
pre-Exilic Hebrew, but there is no way to prove it. But I think it can be
safely said that even in the Masoretic pronunciation tradition that the
different phones preserved by their dots still do not make for phonemic
differences when the same letters are involved.

Karl W. Randolph.