Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Kevin Riley <klriley100 AT gmail.com>]

The conclusion that "ancient Greeks didn’t have the consonants H, W, Y"
would come as a surprise to many Greek scholars, not to mention many of the
"ancient Greeks" themselves.  Mycenaean Greek had symbols for all three, and
many Greek alphabets had letters to represent H and W.  There were no
letters to represent these sounds in the Ionic alphabet, which over a few
centuries became the standard alphabet for most Greek dialects, but that is
an entirely different thing to there being no such sounds in Greek.  In many
Greek dialects W and Y were lost in initial positions, and H was lost in
some eastern dialects fairly early, but the sounds continued in at least
some dialects down into the Koiné period, and as part of diphthongs W
continued long enough to show up as V/F in modern Greek.  Confusion between
IA and IGIA  would indicate Y also survived into the post-Koine period.  It
is generally acknowledged that most of the Doric dialects preserved W in
speech long after they moved to the Ionic alphabet which had no way to
represent it.  Educated Greeks of the Roman period, even with only a little
knowledge of Latin, would have had no trouble comparing Latin V with the W
still surviving in Greek.  The change from earlier OU to later B to
represent Latin consonantal U would lead most linguists to conclude there
was nothing wrong with Greek hearing, and they did accurately perceive the
Latin U and represented it as closely as they could with Greek OU and B.

One thing that a quick reading of even a small part of the evidence for
Greek phonology shows is that spelling was never just a matter of
representing sounds.  Even as early as the Mycenaean tablets, spelling was
as much, if not more, a matter of following conventions.  Educated people in
times past were no more inclined to spelling according to pronunciation than
educated people are today.  That is what makes matching spelling and
pronunciation somewhat difficult.  Unless we find sufficient texts written
by uneducated or semi-educated people, we do not know if a spelling
convention represents current pronunciation or one current centuries
before.  When a city state changed from its local alphabet that represented
W as digamma to the Ionic where it was not represented, does that indicate
that the people had already stopped pronouncing W, or were about to?  Or did
it simply mean that they now learned that W was not written, even when it
was pronounced?  How long did it take before people felt it was 'wrong' to
pronounce a sound that was never written, or did local 'patriotism' keep it
alive long after it would have died a natural death?

Without a larger corpus of texts to compare it with, we cannot tell whether
a Biblical text represents the current pronunciation of when it was written
or an earlier one.  The text of the Pentateuch may represent accurately (at
least as far as the consonants go) the pronunciation of Moses, or of the
time that classical Hebrew was devised (whenever that was), or that of a
later copyist, or of the time of Ezra, or of the time of various other
groups known or thought to be connected with the preservation and passing on
of the text.  When you say "Biblical Hebrew" do you mean the time the text
was first written, when it assumed the form it now has, or some other time?
What would provide the best evidence, a text which preserves the
pronunciation of the C14th BCE, C10th BCE, C8th BCE, etc?  What if a cognate
name in a C21st BCE Akkadian text were to be found?  Would that be better
than a later text?  Would a C21st century Akkadian representation as
Ya-Hu-Wa or Ya-Ha-Wu or Ya-Ha-We really be any more reliable than a C3rd BCE
Greek test that has IAOUE when both are centuries away from Moses?  I am
just curious about what you would accept as evidence.  It almost has to be
from a foreign language, as no Semitic alphabetic text is likely to indicate
any vowels early enough to be considered reliable, yet you seem to be
reluctant to accept evidence from outside Hebrew.

Kevin Riley

On 8 March 2010 11:10, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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.
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