Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Kevin:

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 4:30 PM, Kevin Riley <klriley AT alphalink.com.au>wrote:

> Karl,
>
> Something that has puzzled me for a while: what evidence do you have that
> Hebrew - or any other ancient language - had a one-to-one correspondence
> between letter and sound?  Does not the evidence from most languages point
> the other way?
>
> Kevin Riley
>

This comes down to another question: were the Hebrews the originators or
adopters of their alphabet?

>From historical records, assuming that the Bible is telling the truth that
Moses wrote Torah, the Hebrews had the alphabet before the Phoenicians
adopted it from the Hebrews. Here I take again the pattern where all other
examples that I know of where a person originates an alphabet for a
language, that he makes that alphabet have a one to one relationship between
symbols and recognized phonemes. Therefore, since it appears that the
Hebrews originated their alphabet, they would have made it have a one to one
correspondence between symbols and recognized consonantal phonemes.

Where a person adopts another alphabet for a previously unwritten language,
then some letters will be used in combination for phonemes that the alphabet
doesn’t natively represent, but even then in its original formulation, there
is almost always (if not always) a one to one correlation between a
recognized phoneme and a letter or letter combination. Finnish is an example
of this latter pattern.

So it comes down to whether or not the Hebrews originated their alphabet. I
think the evidence indicates that they did.

Karl W. Randolph.