Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kevin Riley" <klriley AT alphalink.com.au>
To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 1:30 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Simple Pronunciation Question...


> 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
***

In general, writing at its beginning is defective: it does not write 
everything that is actually uttered.
Then it tends to become exhaustive,
Afterwards it tends to become orthographic: a lot of signs are in fact 
useless and more or less disconnected with speech.

It seems to me that Ancient Hebrew is closer to defective than exhaustive.
One-to-one seems fairly reasonable in that case.

Arnaud Fournet