Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

In one wants to do this, one needs to consider the phonology of the
languages across time, like 2nd Temple Hebrew, 2-3 century BCE Greek,
and also 3-4c CE Greek when our uncials B, A, and Sinaiticus were
copied. Fragments and the minor prophet scroll from earlier times round
out the picture.

> 1) Ayin has no correspondent in the Greek and so it moves straight
> on to the
> following vowel.

this is correct, though from what follows I'm not sure that it was understood.

...
> In Genesis 2:11 we see the river Pishon in MT as פִּישׁוֹן
> while in Greek φισων
> thus highlighting other interesting features:
> 1) A confusion between aspirate p and unaspirated p (Greek uses phi).

Confusion? Greek has it correct.
Hebrew 'p' was probably aspirated, just like English 'p' is aspirated.
For aspiration you may be thinking of modern Greek/Erasmian phi='f'?
Unaspirated Greek pi was like Spanish 'p'. But Hebrew did not have a
phonemic feature aspirated vs. unaspirated stops the way that Greek
and Sanskrit did.

...
> In Genesis 2:13 we see the river Gishon in MT as גִּיחוֹן
> while in Greek we
> see γηων thus highlighting more interesting features:
> 1) Despite Greek having a letter chi kh sound is completely
> omitted.

Why "despite"??. An Indoeuropean velar fricative is not a Het, which is
a pharyngeal fricative, voiceless.    Greek had nothing
like Hebrew Het, instead, just like `ayin, the voiced pharyngeal,
Greek tended to
skip it.
But there is a caveat here, because Hebrew dialects tended to preserve
the pharyngeal/velar contrast that was lost in Phoenician and thus not in the
Phoenician-based alphabet.
So Het's and `Ayin's that were VELAR (something not shown
in the Hebrew writing system but sometimes showing up in names like "Gaza")
were sometimes retained as Greek velars. And Greek velars 'g' and 'chi'
became fricatives quite early, probably by the 1st century. Consider
words on the
'holy' root spelled IGERO- (ιγερο- for IERO- ιερο)


> We only
> see its trace in the middle of an unusual combination of Greek
> vowels ηω

And here one must ask which value of HTA was intended, an [i] or [e], and
always remembering to ask according to which manuscripts?
Apparently, HTA went to [i] around the 2nd century CE, maybe a little later.
Fortunately, because this was about 4-5 centuries later than EI went to I,
the spelling traditions with HTA are relatively stable, especially in the
centuries 2-5 CE, when the historical spellings were usually preserved.



-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth AT gmail.com
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