Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>]

David,

On Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:14:30 -0500, David Steinberg
<david.l.steinberg AT rogers.com> wrote:
> 
> Will
> Thanks for your comment.  I do not know how many homographs, assumed
> to stand for phonologically distinct words, exist in Egyptian.

It's probably comparable to Hebrew, considering only the consonantal
text.

> Since
> vocalized Coptic is very late Egyptologists may have no choice in how
> they handle the language.

As I stated.

> 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).

I don't deny this - my point was it's possible to read and pronounce Hebrew
without assuming a particular vocalization.  I'm not arguing that it's
desirable to do so, but note that choosing to do this doesn't necessarily mean
that one is denying (e.g.) that there was a phonological distinction between
qal and pi``el forms, only that one doesn't trust the manuscript tradition
enough to reflect that distinction.

-- 
Will Parsons