Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Arnaud:

2010/7/24 Arnaud Fournet <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>

>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Will Parsons" <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>
> To: <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>
> Cc: <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>; <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
> Sent: Friday, July 23, 2010 10:19 PM
>
> Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] T-SADE
>
>
> ***
>
> In addition, it's well known from Egyptian hieroglyphic that tsamekh was
> nearly doubtless an affricate [ts] (S p r scribe => t_ p r and not **s p r
> as is expected) and as a matter of that nearly all sibilants have been used
> to write /s/ in Greek or Ethiopian but this precise one. So in fact if one
> believes in "aesthetical" argumentation, the conclusion would rather be that
> there is "systemic" support for an affricate /ts./ade because tsamekh was
> itself /ts/.
> …
> Best
>
> Arnaud Fournet
> ***
>
>
> I don’t know anything about Egyptian, but both Greek and Latin adopted the
samech with an “x” (k-s) phoneme.

I do not buy the theory that the Latins learned the alphabet from the
Greeks, as some of the letter forms appear to hearken back to an earlier
stage of development than when the Greeks got the alphabet. If my reading of
the evidence is correct, that means that the Etruscans, from whom the Latins
learned the alphabet, got it before the Greeks did, thereby making the Latin
evidence independent of the Greek evidence.

So if the samech was originally a xameke that lost its unique pronunciation
during the Persian era, as I think the evidence indicates, then it would not
have conflicted with the tsada (t-s) as a different phoneme.

Karl W. Randolph.