Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Thanks for that Yitzhak. It was very educational. Thanks for spending your
time sharing your superior knowledge with me. Could you also give a little
help in another area of my inferior understanding?

What is the usual way of transliterating holem waw?

James Christian

2010/1/18 Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>

> To add to all that Randall Buth has said:
>
> > From Genesis 2:8 we see Eden in MT as עֵדֶן however, in Greek we see Eδεμ
> > (edem) thus highlighting two features.
>
> > 2) A confusion between the similarly pronounced phones of n and m.
>
> It probably wasn't an issue of similar pronunciation but rather of
> influence from
> Aramaic.  As speakers were beginning to say many of the same words in both
> Hebrew and Aramaic, Hebrew borrowed words from Aramaic, sometimes
> complete with their plurals (which end in -n).  This led to two
> equivalent plural
> by-forms -n and -m, and eventually led to even non-plural words that ended
> in
> n/m to have by-forms.  This process began very early, in my opinion,
> from the mid-
> 7th century BCE.  The earliest attestation of this is apparently in an
> Elephantine
> personal name NTWM (rather than NTWN).  This process is clearly seen in the
> plural of the word MLH in Job.  MLH, which in earlier books is used only in
> archaic contexts, was borrowed again due to Aramaic into non-archaic
> contexts as well.  Job has the plural MLYN 13 times, but the by-form plural
> MLYM 10 times.  Job also shows the n/m neutralization process underway in
> normative Hebrew plurals as in BXYYN 24:22 and and )XRYN 31:10.  This
> development shows just how important it is to have an understanding of
> Mishnaic Hebrew for reading the Bible, because the primary audience of the
> Bible read the words but understood them in Mishnaic Hebrew terms.
>
> > 1) A confusion between aspirate p and unaspirated p (Greek uses phi).
>
> The general transcription of consonants from Hebrew to Greek is:
> emphatic k,t,(p) -> kappa, tau,(pi)
> aspirated (dagesh) k,t,p -> chi,theta,phi
> fricative (rafe) k,t,p -> chi,theta,phi
>
> This is not an issue of confusion, but rather of the inability of Greek to
> differentiate the two categories of aspirated and fricative letters.
>
> Yitzhak Sapir
> _______________________________________________
> b-hebrew mailing list
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
>