Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Steinberg <david.l.steinberg AT rogers.com>]

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.