Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Hi all,

for the purpose of this new line of discussion let's just assume the
cracking of Akkadian using Old Persian transliterations as names in turn the
cracking of which relying on transliterations into Greek that the mainstream
theory is true i.e. that three vowel sounds were differentiated in their
writing system with an approximate vowel quality of /a/, /i/ and /u/. Does
this mean that the implementors of the Akkadian writing system could not
differentiate between an 'o' and a 'u'? Does this mean that the implementors
could not distinguish between a 'i' and an 'e'? How realistic a proposition
would this sound to anyone with a good grasp of a variety of modern
languages? And so, in turn, the question must be asked 'Did the implementors
of the writing system use tests like minimal pairs in their formulation of
the writing system?'. Does not the distinct possibility exist that they
could differentiate 'a', 'e', 'i', 'o' and 'u' with no difficulty but that
'e' and 'i' were grouped into 'i' and that 'o' and 'u' were grouped into
'u'? That is to say is it not possible that the level of perception they
were working at did not perceive a great enough difference to warrant making
the writing system an even bigger mess but that at some level these
differences were perceived?

James Christian