Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Thanks,

I can see why Origen's hexapla would be a very good source. I thought I'd
start with the LXX because (presumably) its transliterations would be older.

James Christian

2010/1/18 Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>

> Dear James,
>
> A very good source that illuminates the
> correspondence and lack of correspondence between
> Hebrew and Greek letters is: E. Brönno. "Studien
> über hebräische Morphologie und Vocalismus".
> Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes
> xxvii, 1943.  This is a study of the Mercati
> manuscript of Origen's Hexapla.
>
>
> Best regards,
>
> Rolf Furuli
> University of Oslo
>
>
>
>
> >Hi all,
> >
> >recent discussions have led me to take a closer look at transliteration
> >patterns from Hebrew to Greek. I share my preliminary observations below:
> >
> >>From Genesis 2:8 we see Eden in MT as ÚÕ“‘Ô however, in Greek we see
> EɬɈÉ
> >(edem) thus highlighting two features.
> >
> >1) Ayin has no correspondent in the Greek and so it moves straight on to
> the
> >following vowel.
> >2) A confusion between the similarly pronounced phones of n and m.
> >
> >In Genesis 2:11 we see the river Pishon in MT as
> >Ù¦ È÷ÂðÔ while in Greek É"É«É-É÷ÉÀ
> >thus highlighting other interesting features:
> >
> >1) A confusion between aspirate p and unaspirated p (Greek uses phi).
> >2) We see Greek omega (long o) stading in the place of holem waw as we
> would
> >ordinarily expect
> >
> >In Genesis 2:13 we see the river Gishon in MT as ’¦ ÈÁÂðÔ while in Greek
> we
> >see ɡɉÉ÷ÉÀ thus highlighting more interesting features:
> >
> >1) Despite Greek having a letter chi kh sound is completely omitted. We
> only
> >see its trace in the middle of an unusual combination of Greek vowels ɉÉ÷
> >2) Long /i:/ vowel transliterated with ɉ
> >3) Again Greek omega stands for holem waw as we would expect (we haven't
> >gone far into the Torah but we are already starting to notice a consistent
> >pattern here)
> >
> >We see in MT ýÀ“ÀÌ but in LXX we see AɬÉøÉ
> >again highlighting an already seen
> >feature:
> >
> >1) Impossible to represent consonant aleph is dropped from transliteration
> >and its following vowel is the first letter we see (i.e. alpha)
> >
> >In general, we see that problem consonants are omitted and their nearest
> >vowels are used instead. This pattern is considerably evident and well
> >testified for the Hebrew holem waw combination which is consistently
> >transliterated with Greek Omega (if there are counter examples I would be
> >delighted to see them).
> >
> >James Christian
> >_______________________________________________
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