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  • From: JimStinehart AT aol.com
  • To: fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr, leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il, b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] words with the same root letters: XCC-N TMR
  • Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 21:18:00 EST


Dr. Fournet:

Your entire argument against my view of XCC-N TMR at Genesis 14: 7 as being
Hurrian boils down to this:

“If the word is originally Hurrian, then it cannot contain any emphatics
[such as tsade/C], as stated before several times. Period.”

Not true. You are confusing the fact that Hurrian did not overtly denote
emphatics in writing with the very different question of whether Hurrian had
emphatic consonants such as emphatic tsade. Consider the following evidence
that Hurrian had emphatic phonemes, including emphatic tsade:

1. Gelb and Purves in “Nuzi Personal Names” show 18 Hurrian names
beginning with emphatic tsade, at pp. 175-182.

2. Gelb and Purves show a whopping 71 names that begin with qof (the
emphatic side of kaf), at pp. 77-89.

3. At the advice of the #1 Hittite linguist in the world, I showed the #1
Hurrian scholar in the world, Gernot Wilhelm, 30 Biblical names in the
Patriarchal narratives that I consider to be Hurrian. Some of those names
have
tsade, qof, ayin and aleph (but never samekh). Prof. Wilhelm raised a series
of technical issues concerning my analysis [such as the need for me to
distinguish -nni from -ni in my explanations of Hurrian meanings (a point you
recently made)], but he never said anything along the lines that a Biblical
name containing an emphatic consonant like tsade or qof, or containing ayin
or
aleph, could not be a Hurrian name. Indeed, in his published work, Prof.
Wilhelm resists the temptation to say exactly how the various Hurrian
phonemes were pronounced:

“Since Hurrian was written with scripts that were designed for other
languages, it is difficult – to a degree, even impossible – to establish the
phonemic vocabulary of Hurrian.” Gernot Wilhelm, “Hurrian”, Chapter 9 in
“The
Ancient Languages of Asia Minor” (2008), ed. Roger D. Woodard, a
(http://books.google.com/books?id=J-f_jwCgmeUC&dq=gernot+wilhelm&sitesec=reviews)
t p.
84.

In your post you said: “You keep confusing graphic issues with phonetic
issues.” But you’re the one who’s doing that. The fact that Hurrian did not
overtly record emphatics in writing does not mean that Hurrian did not have
emphatic consonants like tsade. Per the analysis of Gelb and Purves, and
per Gernot Wilhelm never raising the issue, the better view would appear to
be that Hurrian had emphatic tsade, though Hurrian did not overtly denote any
emphatics in writing.

With everything else matching perfectly (ignoring the medieval pointing of
vowels done by the Masoretes in the Middle Ages, which is totally irrelevant
to a Hurrian analysis of names in the Patriarchal narratives, and which is
another issue that no one but you has raised), to me it makes sense to see
tsade as the early Hebrew author’s choice to record the Hurrian affricate
[whether emphatic or not] in xa-tsi-tsi. If so, then the expected Hebrew
spelling of Hurrian xa-tsi-tsi-ni tam-ri/“Wisdom-the Nine” is the XCC-N TMR
that
we see at Genesis 14: 7.


Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois




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