Biblical Hebrew Forum

[fred putnam <fred.putnam AT gmail.com>]

Two thoughts, neither of which is original:

1. de Saussure suggested that "Language is a ribbon of sound. Native
speakers know where to cut the ribbon." (my paraphrase--I don't have the
book here at home) He was describing the difficulty a new speaker has when
hearing native speakers--they always talk "too fast". Part of the challenge
of syllabification is that when we draw out and exaggerated any sequence of
sounds we hear subphonemic sounds (try stretching out "under"--there should
be a (very) slight moment of silence between /n/ and /d/).

2. I was under the impression that most of the initial vocalization of
Akkadian and Ugaritic (e.g.) reflected two factors: (1) the transliteration
of proper nouns/names (as Champollion or Rawlinson) into relatively known
languages; and (2) analogy with known, related languages (helped, in the
case of Ugaritic, of course, by the "aleph-signs". Then as more and more
texts were read, scholars refined those initial readings, codified them, and
standardized them so that we now have reference grammars that both assume
and promote a greater and greater confidence.

And if these two comments are off-topic, please forgive me.

Thanks for raising this conversation.

Peace.

Fred



On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 3:34 PM, Ratson Naharadama
<yahoo-arch AT heplist.com>wrote:

> Regarding the question of how we know Akkadian, and other dead semitic
> languages, relied on 3 basic vowels (usually labeled a, i, and u):  This
> is done through analyzing the words, how they changed through time and
> region, and their reflections in other languages that we do know the
> pronunciations for. Because of the set structure of the human mouth,
> from which we can fairly confidently assume that these languages were
> being articulated, the mutation of the words can be reasonably
> accurately be predicted and "back predicted". Such things as the
> y-consonant frequently degrading into an i-vowel, the w-consonant
> frequently degrading into a u-vowel are the first big hints to what the
> value of those vowels are. That these vowels are regularly interchanged
> with different logograms and phonograms as if they all represent the
> same vowel is also a big hint, after the process of elimination, that
> there were 3 basic vowels from which these languages structured their
> words.  How these vowels affected neighboring consonants, and how
> consonants affected neighboring vowels reïnforces these big-hints.  That
> these words are transcribed and sometimes borrowed into other languages
> which retain the basic vowels (sometimes coloured through the known
> processes that would colour them between these languages) reïnforces it
> further (especially when a word gets borrowed into several widely
> different languages directly from the source language, and each of these
> borrowings are consistent with each other).
>
> This same kind of analysis has been used on many different language
> families (most particularly the descendants of the PIE and Proto-Semitic
> languages), and new written discoveries over the decades has shown that
> the predictions made by these linguists have been fairly accurate.  With
> the analysis — which was briefly given a few examples in the first
> paragraph — there comes a point where one stops saying "it is possibly
> that" and starts saying "it is highly probable that" or even "we
> confidently say, with very little chance of error, that."
>
> It is because of the fixed structure of the mouth, and the regular way
> in which certain utterances are perceived by the hearer's ear (one of
> you is very fond of "perception") that the predictability of this works
> so well.
>
> Might I recommend to listers that they read or listen to some of the
> work of Seth Lerer and John McWhorter.  I choose them in particular in
> this case because you can get lectures by each of them from The Teaching
> Company (TTC) so you don't even have to actively read any of their
> books, just lazily lay back and listen. :) One is Seth Lerer's "History
> of the English Language" (second edition), and the other is John
> McWhorter's "Story of Human Language."  Both of these lectures touches
> on how linguists do what they do, both give plenty of spoken examples,
> and McWhorter's lecture does go into the Semitic languages as well.
> Both lecturers work consists of 36 half hour lectures (so there is
> plenty of information).  A quick search has shown me that you can
> download these using torrentz.com, but it looks like these may be
> pirated copies, so be aware that doing so would be illegal (which is not
> recommended).  Instead, you may want to go to teach12.com which is TTC's
> website.  Of course, you can always get their books (and other people's
> books) on the topic, as well. :)
>
> --
> Ratson Naharädama
> Denver, Colorado
> _______________________________________________
> b-hebrew mailing list
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
>



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