Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

----- 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.
> ***
> I'm not sure that such an old book is best suited for that kind of issues.
> A.
> ***
>
>
> (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).
> ***
> 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.
> ***
>
>
>
> 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.
> ***
> 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.
> ***
>
>
> (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.
> ***
> 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.
> ***
>
>
>
> 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.
> ***
> 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.
> ***
>
>
>
> My own view is that the various sibilants routinely get confused in going 
> from one ancient language to another.
> ***
> Yes, that PoV opens the door to all windows...
> A.
> ***
>
>
>
> 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.
> ***
> Fully agreed.
> A.
> ***
>
>
>  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.
> ***
> Yes there is considerable discrepancy in the PoVs.
> A.
> ***
>
>
> 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.
> ***
> No
> It's the least speculative of all.
> A.
> ***
>
>
> 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”.
> ***
> As mentioned before, you are confusing graphic issues about cuneiform with 
> phonetic issues about the real languages.
> A.
> ***
>
>
>
> They show 18 Hurrian names beginning with tsade, interspersed among a much 
> larger number of Hurrian names that begin with Z.
> ***
> 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
> ***