Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Arnaud:

On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 10:41 PM, Arnaud Fournet
<fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>wrote:

>
>>
>>  ***
> As far as I know, Semitic had :
> *s (=shin) *s. (fused with tsade in Hebrew)
> *ts (=tsamekh) *dz *ts. (=tsade)
> It seems logical that *z also existed but I'm not aware that we can prove
> the existence of a contrast between *z and *dz somewhere within the
> perimeter of Semitic languages.
> … And from Egyptian transcriptions which use t_ for z like Gezer = q t_ r
> it can be inferred that early Hebrew and other related "Cananean" dialects
> had an affricate dz.
>
> A.
> ***
>
> Arnaud Fournet
> ***
>
> I don’t know ancient Egyptian, so my question is, did it have the “x”
phoneme or anything similar? If not, then is not the “ts” phoneme the
closest to “x” that they had?

Secondly, how well do we know ancient Egyptian pronunciation? Just as there
are variances among members of this list concerning pre-Babylonian Exile
Hebrew pronunciation, so are there reasons to question what we “know” about
ancient Egyptian pronunciation?

Thirdly, assuming that the Greek pronunciation of Xi was the “x” phoneme,
there is evidence that as late as the Persian period, the Hebrew samekh was
pronounced as an “x”, though there is evidence that it was losing its “x”
sound to be replaced with a simple “s” phoneme (Nehemia 2:1, 5:14, 13:6,
Ezra sometimes with a samekh, sometimes with a sin e.g. Ezra 4:7–8, 7:1,
8:1).

Look forward to your answer.

Karl W. Randolph.