Biblical Hebrew Forum

["James Spinti" <JSpinti AT Eisenbrauns.com>]

Then what of the Ugaritic alphabet, with the 3 'Alephs, one for each
primary vowel sound? And, does that mean that the Akkadian scribe was
likewise unable to distinguish vowels and consonants; you have
ba/bi/pa/pi occurring as allophones of the same symbol. But, since the
cuneiform system was taken over by the Hittites, with an Indo-European
language, then we can say that the ancients didn't know the difference
between vowels and consonants? 

Sorry, way too simplistic and far too many holes. The current theories
may have some holes, but they are much better at explaining all the
changes that occur over time. Language change generally follows very
strict rules (of course, there are exceptions, but they can usually be
predicted).

Expand your data to include more ancient languages, such as Hittite,
Sumerian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, etc. Granted most of those are cuneiform
and therefore syllabic, but how they make their languages work with the
existing signs could be very illuminating. For example, Hittite using CV
and CVC signs and still managing to get consonant clusters consisting of
3 consonants!

Or, am I misunderstanding what you are trying to say?

James
________________________________
James Spinti
Marketing Director, Book Sales Division
Eisenbrauns, Good books for more than 30 years
Specializing in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical Studies
jspinti at eisenbrauns dot com
Web: http://www.eisenbrauns.com
Phone: 574-269-2011 ext 226
Fax: 574-269-6788 

-----Original Message-----
From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of James Christian
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 10:39 AM
To: b-hebrew
Subject: [b-hebrew] Perception influenced the origin of the Hebrew
alphabet?

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
_______________________________________________
b-hebrew mailing list
b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew