Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Hi all,

I wanted to present the following idea to you. Before I start I should
perhaps mention that I have an MSc distinction in Human Language Technology
(amongst other computationally linguistic MSc's, MA's) and a large part of
my formal training was in that of speech recognition and speech synthesis.
Another thing that readers of this theory should know about me is that
despite my extensive academic background I try to avoid getting bogged down
with academic terminology as it often serves only to confuse the simplicity
of the concepts being presented.

Before getting on with presenting to you my theory about how perception
influenced the origin of the Hebrew alphabet I will make a few observations
about various alphabets and their shortcomings. We can largely divide
writing systems into categories such as logographic (pictures representing
concepts) and phonetic (symbols represent perceived sounds). Those of you
who are hard core academics please don't get hung up on the official
difference between terms like phonetic and phonemic. It will only prevent
you from seeing the simplicity of the concepts being presented. So, let's
call alphabets pictoral and sound alphabets instead to prevent any
unnecessary confusion. It is evident that all sound alphabets are ambiguous.
That is to say that we can find symbols which can represent a variety of
perceivable sounds and in various points in history alphabets have been
revised. No doubt, one of the best attempts to make an unambiguous sound
alphabet is that of the IPA (call it phonetic, call it phonemic, call it
whatever you like if it helps you to follow the theory being presented).
However, when we open up a file like a .wav and take a look at the speech
signal things start to get a little bit more objective and we start to see
that there even the IPA leaves a lot to be desired. Symbols from the IPA
align onto a variety of wave patterns. The main differences are in the
beginning and end of the wave pattern as they depend on which sound precedes
and which sound follows. It is for this reason that speech recognition
systems that use a sliding window and n-phones rather than phones as the
unit of recognition are more successful.

This brings us into the area of psycholinguistics and of that of perception.
What gives rise to ambiguity in attempts to form even the most sophisticated
of alphabets such as the IPA is the fact that we are limited by our
perception when we invent such an alphabet. In the same way every people
that ever invented an alphabet was also limited by their own perception. And
so it is evident that when we look at phonetic/phonemic alphabets (call them
what you like. it is irrelevant to the simplicity of what I am presenting)
we can gain insight into the perception of the inventors of that alphabet.
That is to say that it is evident that the inventors of the latin and Greek
alphabets made perceptual distinctions between vowel sounds. It is also
evident that the inventors of the Tiberian vowel pointing made perceptual
distinctions (even if they may not be the same ones).

So what can we say about the perception of the inventors of the Hebrew
alphabet? Can we say that they could only hear consonants? Evidently they
could also hear vowels passively as this information helped them to resolve
potential ambiguities in speech signals. But could they hear them actively?
That is to say, did they perceive them as distinct enough sounds to include
them in their alphabet? Evidently they didn't? They perceived only syllables
(a higher level compared to consonants and vowels) and therefore used a set
of (to us) ambiguous symbols for their alphabet. That is to say that Ba, Bi,
Bu were all perceived as the same syllable by the inventors of the alphabet
and thus all these 'allosyllables' were represented by the same symbol
(Beth).

The implications of this seem to strongly suggest that the state of the
language of the inventors of the Hebrew alphabet was predominantly (if not
entirely) of CV structure.

James Christian