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  • From: Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>
  • To: Arnaud Fournet <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>
  • Cc: Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] the little things
  • Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2010 08:46:53 -0700

On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 1:48 AM, Arnaud Fournet
<fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>
>>
>> Kevin:
>> The lentition of the letters bgdkpt is usually placed much later.  Many
>> think it came in after the Exile.  So the answer is no, no C12th BCE
>> Hebrew speaker would have known of this.  But after it did become part
>> of Hebrew, yes, ordinary speakers would notice.  Anyone who used the
>> wrong variant would have sounded either 'wrong' or 'foreign', just like
>> in languages today that have the same phenomenon.
>>
>> This brings us back to a point often made: the Hebrew we have in the
>> Masoretic texts represents the way Hebrew was chanted in the second half
>> of the 1st millennium CE.  As part of the tradition of Hebrew, it is
>> part of the evidence of how Hebrew was spoken in the 1st or 2nd
>> millennium BCE, but it is not, nor was it meant to be, a trascription of
>> how Moses, David or Ezra pronounced Hebrew.
>>
>> Kevin Riley
>>
> ***
>
> How do you reconcile "tradition of Hebrew" and "it is not a transcription of
> how Moses, David or Ezra pronounced Hebrew"?
>
> How do you identify the potential changes and conservations?

I'll let Kevin answer on his own and just add a comment. On one of
the threads in the last couple of weeks I pointed out how we can
date the entrance of the bgdkpt alternation into Aramaic to the last
part of the First Temple period. this explains how the interdentals
systematically changed from being written with "shin" and "zayin"
to being written with "tav" and "dalet" in the 6th century and later.

As for the vowels, the seven-vowel Masoretic system is obvioiusly
a development from the earlier Semitic "three-vowel + length"
systems. The common transformation of reading the MT as a
five-vowel system (Sefardic/Kimchi) appears to restore a pre-MT,
earlier stage of Hebrew, one that was partially in place during
Ezra's day, if not David's. We have evidence of diphthongal
collapse in northern Hebrew as early as the 8C BCE with ostraca
(yn 'wine' [yayin -> yen]) as well as hints in the biblical text (Amos
'qayits->qets/qets' wordplay when addressing the North).

Randall Buth


>
> To be frank "it is not" looks like a decree.
>
> Arnaud Fournet
>
>
>



--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth AT gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
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