Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 9:44 AM, James Christian
<jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>wrote:

> You picked a beauty with the English language. Of all the languages I know
> it is the one in the most need of a new alphabet.


I had completely forgotten about it, until these recent discussions reminded
me of it. The it? When I was in second grade, I recognized how awful is the
correspondence between the English alphabet and the phonemic structure of
the English language. So I sat down and tried to devise an updated alphabet
that would have a one-to-one relationship with the phonemes of spoken
English.

But then I quickly learned another lesson: there is no interest in society
for fixing a broken system 1) because it isn’t broken enough to be unusable,
so we limp along and 2) who would want a system devised by a second grade
kid. So within a couple of weeks, I gave up the effort, and forgot about it.


>
> And so with English we see the opposite phenomenon. We see our perception
> being influenced by our alphabet rather than our alphabet being formed from
> our perception. We have inherited a mess of a an alphabet with words
> representative of pronunciation guides of a variety of languages. However,
> as your anecdotal evidence shows our alphabet is in desparate need of
> reimplementation along with our writing system in general.
>
> However, the inventors of the Hebrew alphabet didn't receive it from many
> different conquerors from different nations. They invented it. They were in
> complete control of how to implement it.
>

This is my point exactly! At a time when borrowed alphabets had letters
added and subtracted to make the alphabet fit the target language instead of
the source language, that symbols were asked to represent more than one
sound was unusual, to say the least.

I also think that the Hebrews were the originators of the alphabet, not the
borrowers, and that the Phoenicians, Arameans, et al borrowed from the
Hebrews.

>
> James Christian
>

Karl W. Randolph.