Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Garth:

You wrote, “This is common knowledge.”

This is not common knowledge, but a common belief among scholars today. What
I am doing is questioning that belief. Why have they come to it? On what
basis?

If on the basis of transliterations from other languages, that is a
notoriously slippery slope. An early cartoon in the U.S., the Katzenjammer
Kids, poked lighthearted fun at how immigrants mispronounced English. Or
another example, once when trying to teach a boy whose mother tongue had no
‘r’ nor a ‘bl’, when he was told to say “zebra”, he heard “zee-ba-la”, three
syllables, and that’s how he said it. Or if I look at how my name has been
pronounced: when I lived near the Mexican boarder, many of the “mojados”
called me “Carlos”, here in San Francisco many of the Cantonese speaking
people call me “Gaa Lou” (according to the jyut pin Romanization) and some
Toisanese speaking people merely call me “a-ko”. So from these examples,
will I get an accurate pronunciation of “Karl”?

So further, when a language doesn’t have a phoneme, how do people in that
language perceive it when it is spoken in another language? Because the
ancient Greeks didn’t have the consonants H, W, Y, how did they perceive
Vespasian when the ‘V’ was pronounced like a ‘W’? Did they perceive a
diphthong? So rather than being evidence for a particular pronunciation of
Greek, is this evidence of psycho-linguistics on how ancient Greeks
perceived other languages? Further, different languages would be perceived
differently.

What you have yet to do is to give me any indication whatsoever that YHWH
was pronounced “Yahweh” in the original Biblical Hebrew pronunciation. From
Hebrew sources, I conclude that the name had at least three syllables.

On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 5:16 PM, Garth Grenache 
<garthgrenache AT hotmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> Dear Karl,
>
>
> Again, Clement is not a 1st century speaker, but a second-century speaker,
> who wrote IAOUE.  But this makes no difference.  The pronunciation of ou was
> not a diphthong o+u, but was a pure vowel throughout the whole Koine period,
> and even before it in Attic Greek.
>

Where is your evidence? The spelling indicates otherwise.

>
> Garth Grenache.
>


Karl W. Randolph.