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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Vocalization and reading of Biblical Hebrew

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  • From: David Steinberg <david.l.steinberg AT rogers.com>
  • To: Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>, b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Vocalization and reading of Biblical Hebrew
  • Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:14:30 -0500


Will
Thanks for your comment. I do not know how many homographs, assumed to stand for phonologically distinct words, exist in Egyptian. Since vocalized Coptic is very late Egyptologists may have no choice in how they handle the language. However, in Hebrew we have multiple streams of evidence (vowel letters; Amarna Canaaanite; Greek transcriptions; Palestinian, Babylonian, and Tiberian pointing; modern pronunciation traditions; closely cognate languages - Aramaic/Syriac, Arabic etc) which often enable us to convincingly reconstruct a chain of pronunciation developments from Proto-Semitic through Biblical Hebrew to Tiberian Hebrew. It is therefore gratuitous to ignore all this evidence and pretend that we have no idea of the original BH vocalization(s).

Take a look at <DBR> http://www.houseofdavid.ca/anc_heb_5.htm#orth . Most of the distinctive MT vocalizations of <DBR> can easily be traced back to distinctive reconstructed PS and probable BH forms. So does it really make sense to ignore vowels that are probable and to pretend that every instance of <DBR> is simply a hompgraph that might stand for "he spoke", "it was said", "thing/word", "cattle plague" etc.?

David Steinberg

Ottawa, Canada

To pronounce any language one must use vowels, but it's not necessary to assume a vocalization. Egyptologists do this all the time (perforce, since Egyptian does not indicate vowels and there is no equivalent for the Massoretic vowel points). So, an Egyptian word transcribed (slightly simplifying) <sdmf> (approx. "he hears") is conventionally pronounced /sedemef/, where the various e's have been inserted simply for the purposes of making the word pronounceable, but with no illusions that this is how the word was actually pronounced by Egyptians. I personally would not take this approach to the Biblical text, but Karl has indicated many times that he regards the Massoretic vowel pointing to be so frequently wrong as to prefer to ignore it. Even if you don't agree with this assessment, I don't think it's completely unreasonable, and if one does so, one can readily apply the approach taken by Egyptologists to Hebrew.




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