Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

----- Original Message ----- 
From: K Randolph

***
There are clearly three things I disagree with :
1. your replacement of words like heykhal by skeletons like HYKL
This amounts to destroying information.


KR
I used the accepted transliteration scheme that has been used on this list 
for years. It is listed elsewhere on this site.
Seeing as the consonantal text is original, I have not destroyed any 
information.
***
No
The "text" was originally a document spoken in a real language with vowels.
and I see no reason to think the Masoretic tradition is incorrect.
It's just your dogma that the document should be purged from its vowels.
I disagree with that purge.
A.
***



Seeing as the pronunciation points are de facto medieval commentary, I 
simply choose not to add them to the original.
***
I disagree with the characterization as "medieval commentary".
They are inherited.
I don't really understand why you want or need to discard them. At this 
point i do not understand your motivations.
A.
***




History is off topic for this list, except that you included it in your 
messages.
Whether you agree or not is irrelevant.
***
If Biblical Hebrew is not a topic loaded with history,
then what is ?
A
***



KR:
we can’t say when Sumerian ceased being a natively spoken language.
***
I disagree.
Probably sometimes around -1800 BCE at the very last.
A.
***
KR:
And what is your evidence?
***
At the beginning of the 2nd millenium, texts written in Sumerian gradually 
fossilize in a completely standardized language.
Before that, we have plenty of dialectal and scribal variants, showing the 
language is alive and displays the expected level of inaccuracy and 
variation of a normal language.
Ca. -1900 BCE that situation disappears and instead what we have is a kind 
of forever-stable language.
In other words the language is dead. It's become a liturgical and cultural 
language that does not evolve anymore.
In addition, we have spontaneous copies of Sumerian texts showing that the 
orthography of late Sumerian is artificial and does not correspond to the 
way they read it when the language was alive.
A.
***



The same with Ugaritic—I have seen dates as late as roughly 800–600 BC for 
when the library was composed and it is possible that Ugarit was destroyed 
by the Babylonians around the same time as Judea was exiled.
***
I have no opinion on this point.
Arnaud Fournet