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  • From: "Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>
  • To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Fw: words with the same root letters: XCC-N TMR
  • Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:40:49 +0100


----- Original Message ----- From: "Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>
To: <jimstinehart AT aol.com>; <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>; <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Monday, January 17, 2011 9:48 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] words with the same root letters: XCC-N TMR



From: jimstinehart AT aol.com
To: jimstinehart AT aol.com ; fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr ; leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il ; b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Monday, January 17, 2011 3:30 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] words with the same root letters: XCC-N TMR


In trying to understand the pronunciation of Late Bronze Age samekh and tsade in early Biblical Hebrew, it’s helpful to look at Phoenician and Egyptian.

A. Phoenician

Scholars who focus on Phoenician seem to see tsade as TS and samekh as s:

(1) “Tsade is superfluous [in the Phoenician alphabet], since it represents, not an elemental sound, but a combination of sounds, t and …[There are] two [forms] for s, namely samech and shin.” George Rawlinson, “History of Phoenicia” (1889), at p. 379.
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I'm not sure that such an old book is best suited for that kind of issues.
A.
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(2) “In the Phoenician list were: samekh, with a sharp-S sound about like our S in "Silly!"; tsade for the TS sound….” Keith Gordon Irwin, “The Romance of Writing: From Egyptian Hieroglyphics to Modern Letters, Numbers & Signs” (1961).
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Lol.
How does that person who deals with writing explain that all sibilant letters have been used to write Greek s but his allegedly "sharp-S sound about like our S in "Silly!".
Indeed silly is the adequate word.
A.
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B. Egyptian

(1) First a Hebrew scholar, who is reviewing the literature on the subject generally, including Egyptian comparisons:

“Z, [underdotted] Z, and [underdotted] tsade are rendered by Egyptian [underlined] d = /dj/ [though Rainey, below, uniquely uses nderlined ]. …Canaanite samekh (s) is represented by [underlined] t. It has been suggested that this may have been realized as a palatal or pre-palatal stop (like /ty/) or an affricate (like /ts/). …Steiner (1983) argues that the affricate pronunciation of tsade in Hebrew and Aramaic is not a late Ashkenazic development but is an ancient variant of the fricative /s/ pronunciation….” Nahum M. Waldman, “The Recent Study of Hebrew” (1989), at pp. 19-20.
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On that kind of issues, among others, I would recommend to read a synthesis like in:
The Nostratic macrofamily: a study in distant linguistic relationship
Allan R. Bomhard, John C. Kerns
Walter de Gruyter, 1994
Pages 92 sq

A.
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(2) The mid-15th century BCE Thutmose III list of places in Canaan:

(a) Samekh. Of the 119 items on the mid-15th century BCE Thutmose III list of places in Canaan, only o-n-e has a samekh. Guess what one that is? It’s item #3, xa-Si-ya [where I myself am using capital S for samekh]. Most scholars, such as Anson Rainey, see this as being Hasi in the Beqa Valley, which Rainey transliterates at Amarna Letter EA 175: 4, EA 185: 43, and EA 186: 62 as xa-si. At least in this one key case, Rainey and other scholars are seeing samekh as being reflected in the Amarna Letters as s, not as the affricate TS.

In many other cases, samekh represented the CH sound in “church” in Egyptian, at least in the Middle Bronze Age. Samekh is tj in Egyptian, with the Egyptian hieroglyph being the tj3 bird. In fact, last year Prof. Rainey was gracious enough to send me an E-mail, in which he said regarding item #3 on his rendering of the T III list [which appears at p. 72 of “The Sacred Bridge”]: “The ‘s’ with a grave accent (backwards) represents the tj consonant of Egyptian. The hieroglyph is the tj3 bird. The tj always stands for samech which has its own pronunciation, not a simple ‘s’ in the Bronze Age.” True, Prof. Rainey doesn’t say what sound the samekh has here, and he specifically says it’s not sin/%/s. But we nevertheless do see samekh relate to s in Hasi here, per the Amarna Letters.

(b) Tsade. Rainey sees only 2 items on the T III list as being identified in Hebrew by a name that includes a tsade. In both cases, items #32 and #116, the Egyptian hieroglyph is the flame, U 28. In the Middle Bronze Age that had been a cobra [or snake], usually viewed as being DJ or DZ or DA. In one other case [item #79], the flame hieroglyph is tsade in the Amarna Letters, as is also the case for item #32. A fourth case, item #60, has the flame hieroglyph as being a Z in the Amarna Letters.

The last case where the flame hieroglyph has a counterpart, item #69, is particularly fascinating: it’s a samekh under Amenhotep II! [Amenhotep II was Thutmose III’s successor, reigning at the end of the 15th century BCE.] This may indicate that as late as the 15th century BCE, it was somewhat unclear whether samekh or tsade should be used for the affricate TS. Yet by the mid-14th century BCE in the Amarna Letters, the only samekh on the T III list is s in the Amarna Letters, and in three cases tsade on the T III list is tsade in the Amarna Letters. From the 14th century BCE through the 9th century BCE, samekh seems to be have been between a zayin and a sin, starting out as closer to zayin than to sin. Beginning in the 8th century BCE, samekh had become identical in sound to sin.
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Anyway, I think that the conventional readings of Egyptian hieroglyphs are even more conventional than those of Ancient Hebrew,
so the direction of increasing incertaintly is the opposite of what you are trying to do.
A.
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C. Conclusions

We continue to see evidence that in the 15th and 14th centuries BCE, samekh was not a TS affricate [even if samekh might arguably have had that sound earlier], or at least, samekh was not always a TS affricate in the Late Bronze Age. Per Richard Steiner, tsade may have been a TS affricate from day #1. We see the flame hieroglyph on the T III list routinely being a tsade and, unlike the samekh, never being an s.
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There must have happened a chain of changes:
Proto-Semitic *ts > tsamekh > ts > s
Proto-Semitic *th and *s > shin
(Arabic kept them separated)

I don't know if we can assign a dating to that change.
In all cases it seems to be rather late, I mean, maybe not earlier than the middle of the 1st millenium BC.

A.
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My own view is that the various sibilants routinely get confused in going from one ancient language to another.
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Yes, that PoV opens the door to all windows...
A.
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There is not only the issue of what the precise sound of the sibilant was, but equally importantly, there is the issue of how various peoples represented various sibilant sounds in writing.
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Fully agreed.
A.
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My point is that we should “widen the strike zone” in comparing words in various different languages against each other as to the various sibilants that are rendered in writing in the different languages. I’m not sure there’s a majority view of scholars on any of these issues; I have not been able to discern one. At a minimum, many different scholars have many different views as to how various sibilants were pronounced and written in the Late Bronze Age.
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Yes there is considerable discrepancy in the PoVs.
A.
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In a Late Bronze Age setting, tsade may or may not be emphatic, and it may or may not be a TS affricate, in comparing various different ancient languages against each other. I do not think that a proposed match of a Biblical Hebrew name to a Hurrian name should be ruled out on the grounds that the sound in Hurrian was tsi, and that a Hebrew tsade in the mid-14th century BCE allegedly could not have been a non-emphatic TS affricate, with the assertion then being that the early Hebrew author would have only used a non-emphatic TS affricate to represent tsi in Hurrian, which would have to be Hebrew samekh. To me, that’s a highly speculative position to take.
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No
It's the least speculative of all.
A.
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More reasonable is that if the sound was tsi in Hurrian and was spelled either zi or si in Hurrian [which is what the Fournet/Bomhard website says], then such sound m-i-g-h-t well come over into Biblical Hebrew in chapter 14 of Genesis as tsade. Thus on linguistic grounds, I do not think it is proper to rule out XCC as being an early Biblical Hebrew rendering of xa-tsi-tsi in Hurrian. As to the issue of spelling, I have previously quoted Gelb and Purves on tsade alternating with Z at Nuzi, as they refer to “the interchange of tsade and z values”.
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As mentioned before, you are confusing graphic issues about cuneiform with phonetic issues about the real languages.
A.
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They show 18 Hurrian names beginning with tsade, interspersed among a much larger number of Hurrian names that begin with Z.
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No
There is no such thing. You are inventing references and citing pages that don't deal with Hurrian.

[Sorry I forgot to sign with my full name]
Arnaud Fournet
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  • [b-hebrew] Fw: words with the same root letters: XCC-N TMR, Arnaud Fournet, 01/17/2011

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