Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 1:45 AM, James Christian
<jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com> wrote:
> As I suspected. You don't actually know of any evidence do you? You just
> read a few comparative linguistic papers and accepted the concensus to be
> true.

Well, that means that we who recognize three Akkadian vowels I, A, U (and E 
+/O)
are sitting with the whole field of Semitic studies and 150 years of
phonological
work. And we/they have recognized that the evidence is compelling.
And you are sitting alone trying to believe that any voice from the street has
equal weight by saying "I don't/can't see evidence". It's not our
fault or responsibility.
As Sapir said, "It is amazing how far you'd go to simply refuse to
even read evidence
against your position."
And the evidence is massive and far beyond the practical constraints
of a public
email list. We can summarize for someone, but that person must have a desire
to learn.
Let me ask a fun question, on she'iltihu "I asked him",
Did you enjoy explaining where the first MT 'i' vowel came from? Did
you find it
interesting to consider that language systems have 'fossils' in them?
If not, you
may not enjoy studying historical linguistics. It's actually not my cup of tea
either, since I prefer focusing on meaning.

wa-yaktub JamesC
>If you had looked into it you would find that the whole argument is
> circular.

Did you miss the fact that OLD PERSIAN, the key to the Babylonian
decipherment, is an INDO EUROPEAN language while Babylonian/Akkadian
is a SEMITIC language?
Of course, even when working within a macrolanguage family, a historical
linguistic construction is not circular, anymore than working down from leaves
and twigs to lower branches is circular. But one must understand
some historical linguistics and study how phoneme systems change.
If someone were to say [not JamesC],
"My evidence is entirely from within the Hebrew language,
as I have done no cognate language comparisons." Then they are not playing
with a full deck. One cannot throw out Spanish, Italian, French,
Romanian, et al.,
if one wants to best describe the development of Latin. But its not circular.

And as Stony Brewer remarked:
"The *interesting* question is how people parse the acoustic fact into
the linguistic fact".
In common linguistic terms, that is how the phonetics trigger and signal the
phonemes. Though even that question is secondary, or tertiary.

Linguists first establish that a PHONEMIC contrast exists, with 'minimal 
pairs'
typically providing the first cut of analysis and in modern languages without
regard to a writing system, should one exist. Only later do they get to
extracting the minimal phonemic system(s) [there are competing theories
about how to best describe and write up a phonology, even when there is
agreement about whether or not something is phonemic], and only later
does the question of 'how' enter the picture. (PS, fricative production of
begedkefet phonemes was not phonemic in Phoenician, though separate
phonemes of 'gh' 'dh' 'th' and 'kh' did exist in non-Phoenician Semitic
languages.)

blessings
Randall

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