Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

I'm not confusing anything with anything. There are so many problems with
what you just said that I don't know where to start.

1) You seem to assume the scribes had an understanding of the difference
between consonants and vowels
2) You also seem to assume that they analysed language in this way as you do
3) You have explicitly assumed that plene holem (OW) and defective holem (O)
both map onto the same phone /o:/
4) This shows me that you seem to wrongfully assume that the IPA represents
the complete set of phones

As a computational linguist I don't feel that the IPA gets anywhere near to
representing the full spectrum of units of sound we can distinguish in a
speech signal. For me there was quite clearly a subtle difference between OW
and O. It may have been too small for some to detect and to create confusion
over but it was nonetheless there and this phonetic ambiguity has caused
scribes to make choices.

Regarding your theorised YaHW. This is simply unpronounceable. We see two
forms IAW and IAOU which when pronounced using the normal way of pronouncing
Greek letter sequences are striking similar to YahoW and Yahu (pronounced
Yahoo (Greek OU diphthong is a long U vowel)). Funnily enough, in the
pointing of the MT we see theophoric components of names with these very
same pronunciations Yeho (YeHoW) and Yahoo (YaHuW). At this point I'm really
failing to see how this is supposed to convince me of a YaHWeH
reconstruction. All you seem to be doing is convincing me of exactly the
opposite.

Do you have even a basic knowledge of how to read Greek character sequences?

James Christian

2010/1/17 Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>

> On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 1:13 AM, James Christian wrote:
> > Yitzhak,
> > there's really no two ways about this. Greek Omega represents a long o
> > vowel. The same thing we would expect when transcribing a holem with a
> final
> > waw (with W phonology rather than V phonology). I really don't see how
> you
> > can expect me to believe that the Greeks would choose the long o vowel to
> > represent a w/v consonant with no preceeding vowel. If this were the case
> > you would be able to refer me to transcriptions of names with a w/v
> > consonant with no preceeding o vowel. I don't think you will be able to
> do
> > that.
> > James Christian
>
> You are confusing orthography with pronunciation.  The -w- is purely an
> orthographical representation of the vowel -o-.  What I'm saying is that
> yahw
> with consonantal -w- (in preexilic times) became yaho, with the vowel o,
> and
> no consonant w, in postexilic times.  (This is what the x > y notation
> means).
> Also, it is not the "Greeks."  It is the scribe of Qumran who chose to
> write out
> the tetragram in this particular case.
>
> In the Masoretic text, the -w- of a holem has no consonantal force at all.
> Writing "OW" for a plene holem and "O" for a defective one may make the
> orthographical difference explicit in English, but there was no difference
> between them pronunciation-wise: they were both just [o:] (and by Masoretic
> times, holem was always long, due to unrelated developments).  So OW/O
> is a misrepresentation in English of the actual pronunciation.  Also, a waw
> functioning as a plene holem cannot take any vowel, because it is not a
> consonant.
>
> Yitzhak Sapir
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