Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Kimmo:

On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 11:31 PM, Kimmo Huovila 
<kimmo.huovila AT kolumbus.fi>wrote:

> On perjantai 07 lokakuu 2011, K Randolph wrote:
> >
> > Close languages
> > can go on divergent development paths.
>
> Yes.
>
> > Therefore, one cannot count on being
> > able to use cognate languages as guides to studying a target language. It
> is
> > speculation to use them as evidence, proof will have to come from the
> target
> > language.
>
> Your statement comes across as a total rejection of a methodology based on
> some recognized limitations in it. A total rejection of the methodology is
> not
> justified by the premises mentioned alone.
>

I don’t think I’m doing a total rejection of the methodology, rather I am
emphasizing that there are limits to what the methodology can do. It is not
all powerful.

To give an example from another family group: Japanese and Korean are
cognate languages, however far enough apart that they are not mutually
understandable. For centuries Korean has been a CVC language. Only in the
last few decades as Japanese borrows loan words from other languages is
Japanese becoming a CVC language after centuries of being a CV language.
>From what I have been told, Japanese was the only CV language in its
language family. If we had only the cognate languages as clues, would we
have learned that about Japanese?

>
> A lot depends on what you are trying to establish. Comparative linguistics
> is
> not at its best trying to figure out the meaning of an individual idiom or
> precise meaning of a vocabulary item in one of the languages. However, it
> may
> give reasonable confidence in the structure of the language and its
> history.
>

The best evidence is from within the language itself. Where there are
records, the history can be established as far as the records extend.
Anything beyond is speculation. It may be guided speculation so it’s not
just a shot in the dark, but how do you know that the guides are the right
ones?

>
> …
>

Was there ever a proto-Semitic language?

The Flood happened around 2500 BC, the Tower of Babel where God mixed up the
languages some time later when a sufficient population recovery happened
after the Flood, probably a couple of centuries later. Was there enough time
from the Tower of Babel to Abraham to account for all the different
languages within the Semitic language family, especially when taking into
account that people lived so long at that time? Or when God mixed up the
languages, he mixed up some a lot and others not as much, and some within
families but already separate enough as not to be mutually understandable?
We don’t have records of these proto languages, did they ever exist?

My interest in historical reconstruction started with a question of the
alphabet: was it original to Hebrew or did Hebrew adopt it from another
language? If originally from Hebrew, then Hebrew originally had only 22
consonantal phonemes, and the theories from the historical linguists are
wrong. I think the evidence from history is that the Hebrew alphabet is
original to Hebrew. We have inscriptional evidence of the Hebrew alphabet in
use during the time of the Egyptian sojourn before the Exodus.

My question concerning whether Biblical Hebrew was originally a CV language
also stems from the same historical question of the alphabet. The reason is
that some of the words would not have been pronounceable without intervening
vowels, e.g. Rivka would have been pronounced as Rebeqah (or even Rebeqahe)
with the e between the b and q an unstressed shewa.

>
> If you are not willing to get that expertise, I do not blame you for that.
> It
> is a lot of work. So I understand if it does not count as evidence to you,
> if
> you feel incompetent to evaluate it. It does not mean that the baby should
> be
> thrown out with the bath water, though.
>
> Kimmo Huovila
>

Yes, it would be a lot of work, and even before starting it it looks wrong
from a historical standpoint, so why go through the effort? And it would
interfere with my main effort of trying to get a feeling for Biblical Hebrew
from the inside out.

Karl W. Randolph.