Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

As I suspected. Yet another long email with no actual content of any value.

James Christian

2010/1/24 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
> Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
>