Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jack Kilmon" <jkilmon AT historian.net>
To: "Isaac Fried" <if AT math.bu.edu>; "Uri Hurwitz" <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>
Cc: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sunday, December 19, 2010 6:11 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] one-to-one rendering of olam (was: Song of 
Songs1:12)


> I wonder if the pharyngeal fricatives are not relics, or living "fossils" 
> of the back clicks from the earliest proto-languages of early humans in 
> Africa and that survive in the click languages of the !Kung or San and 
> Xhosa and Hadzabe.  These go back at least 40,000 years and perhaps even 
> further.  My opinion is that these click sounds may have had their origins 
> in early hunting communication by early humans (maybe as far as H. erectus) 
> imitating animal sounds to communicate.  Their use as consonants probably 
> migrated to the Semitic languages from Africa through Egypt.
>
> Jack Kilmon
***

There is no living language with click sounds that does not have regular 
sounds at the same time,
so it's highly improbable that these sounds are archaic.

Click sounds look more like a peculiar evolved way of pronouncing regular 
sounds.

A.
***