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  • From: K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
  • To: Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] dagesh in two root nouns with patah
  • Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 17:29:12 -0800

Will:

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>wrote:

> On Tue, 16 Nov 2010 19:28:48 -0800, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Will:
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 5:40 PM, Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu
> >wrote:
> >
> > > But I think the situation of Hebrew in Egypt is rather different from
> that
> > > which developed in Latin-speaking areas of Europe,
> >
> > Which, incidentally, included Germany, England, Scandinavia, etc.
>
> No. People in Germany, England, &c. certainly learned Latin, and even
> learned to use it as a means of oral communication, but that's a lot
> different than the situation in France or Italy where people learned (a
> kind
> of) Latin as their mother tongue and only gradually came to the realization
> they were actually speaking something else.
>

The development of Latin included everywhere it was spoken, because by the
medieval period, it was the lingua franca of all of Europe and wherever it
was used, it was recognized that it was a learned language that no one
learned at home. The same situation existed for Hebrew after the Babylonian
Exile.

>
>
> Why should they? Why should Jewish communities in Palestine or Mesopotamia
> whose everyday language was Aramaic choose to pick up the peculiarities of
> pronunciation from some foreign Jews who pronounced Hebrew with a funny
> Greek
> accent?
>

The evidence from the MT indicates that if they did, it was only partial.

>
> >
> > And why would the MT show changes from only one source? Why not several?
> And
> > with the LXX predating the NT, therefore being influential among Jewish
> > readers as to how they would pronounce Hebrew names and words, especially
> > among the largely Greek speaking diaspora, why wouldn’t it have influence
> > also back in Judea?
>
> I find it hard to believe that the LXX was consulted or influential in the
> preparation of the MT. It was after all in foreign language (foreign in a
> way that Aramaic was not), and the oral tradition would be much stronger.
>

I have never claimed that the MT represented anything other than a local
tradition of a certain time and place, and I don’t make any different claim
now. What I ask, what were the sources that influenced that tradition? It
was in an area greatly influenced by Greek, where the dominant language of
the area was Greek and had been for centuries prior to the MT. So can we
rule out the Greek as having at least some influence in that tradition? Does
it make sense to rule it out?

> > >
> > > I'm still unsure of what you're saying here - if you're saying that
> > > "gemination" was not indicated by spelling until the Massoretes
> introduced
> > > the daghesh, then I would agree, but if you're saying that the phonetic
> > > distinction between a non-daghesh consonant and one with daghesh
> (forte)
> > > didn't exist before the Massoretes, then I would have to disagree. I
> can't
> > > help but think that daghesh indicated a phonetic distinction, whether
> > > applied
> > > to BGDKPT consonants or not.
> >
> > Where is your evidence? I think that any evidence that you can point to
> will
> > not be the same, though possibly similar, to that of the MT.
>
> If daghesh didn't indicate a phonetic distinction, what *did* it indicate?
> I can't think it was inserted arbitrarily. (And of course, cognate words
> in
> Arabic evidence the nature of that phonetic distinction.)
>

Of course it indicated phonetic distinction, but where is your evidence that
that phonetic distinction existed a thousand years earlier? That it existed
in pre-Babylonian Exile Hebrew?

>
> > On a similar subject, while reading Luke, I noticed that Jerusalem was
> > spelled as if the final yod indicated a lengthened tsere pronunciation,
> not
> > the same as MT. This is late second temple evidence for that
> pronunciation.
> >
> > The bottom line, I think the evidence indicates that the MT does not
> > represent Biblical Hebrew pronunciation from before the Babylonian Exile.
>
> It depends on how widely you understand "represent". I would certainly
> agree
> that the pronunciation underlying the MT was not that of pre-exilic Hebrew.
> (I doubt that forte/lene distinctions in BGDKPT letters were significant so
> early, for example, and no doubt there were significant differences in
> vowel
> articulation). But the MT is the result of continuous transmission, so it
> can
> not be dismissed as evidence of how Hebrew was pronounced at a much earlier
> time.
>

How much earlier? Just because it was continuous, does that mean a static,
unchanging transmission, or was it a living, changing transmission? Does not
the evidence point to the latter?

>
> --
> William Parsons
>

Karl W. Randolph.




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