Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Kevin Riley <klriley100 AT gmail.com>]

I have a couple of questions: who followed the 'normal practice' of having
one symbol per phoneme?  And if the alphabet was invented for a 22 phoneme
Hebrew, why do the earliest examples have more than 22 letters?  I thought
it was generally agreed that the earliest inscriptions indicate an alphabet
of about 30 symbols.  If the distinction between sin and shin reflect an
outside influence - presumably Aramaic - why is there then a high degree of
agreement with the South Arabian languages concerning the allocation of
these two letters/sounds?  Is this not more likely a result of a shared
inheritance rather than a coincidental development?

Kevin Riley

On 21 March 2010 07:08, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:

>
> The arguments that I have heard over the years claiming that the alphabet
> never fit Hebrew well were based on the belief that Hebrew has always had
> all the phonemes found in MT and later Hebrews. The support for that claim
> are the many phonemes found in the other, cognate languages.
>
> My response is that Second Temple, Mishnaic and later Hebrews were
> corrupted
> by people who spoke Hebrew as a second language, corrupted by importing
> phonemes and phoneme patterns from their primary language.
>
> This goes back to the question, was the Hebrew alphabet developed for the
> Hebrew language? If so, did the developer(s) follow the normal practice of
> one letter per phoneme (excepting vowels in this case, to stop nitpickers)?
> If the answer to the first question is yes, and the second would be unusual
> if it were not yes, then we have de facto historical evidence that the
> language originally had only 22 consonantal phonemes, not the larger number
> seen today nor the larger number found in cognate languages.
>
> Karl W. Randolph.
>