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  • From: "Donald R. Vance, Ph.D." <donaldrvance AT mac.com>
  • To: K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Simple Pronunciation Question...
  • Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 11:06:36 -0600

The Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions predate Moses by 1800 years. The fact that Hebrew uses one grapheme for two sounds demonstrates that they didn't create the alphabet (why make one sign do double duty when you're creating the thing?): sin and shin use the same grapheme. In fact, there may be others. Dalet for both daleth and dhalet if the dhalet phoneme was still present in earlier Hebrew and others. There were around 30 proto-Semitic phonemes and only 22 Hebrew graphemes. How many survived into Hebrew is a matter of some debate and for how long. It is most probable, most would say certain, that the Hebrews did not invent their writing system. It is certainly true of the script that is preserved in the Biblical mss which is the square Aramaic script.


Donald R. Vance, Ph.D.
Professor of Biblical Languages and Literature
Oral Roberts University
dvance AT oru.edu
donaldrvance AT mac.com


On Nov 16, 2010, at 8:54 PM, K Randolph wrote:

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.
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