Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

David:

On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 2:05 PM, David Kolinsky <hadeesh AT sbcglobal.net> wrote:

Karl,
I am not convinced that the Sin and the Shin were pronounced the same in Biblical times.

I noticed that there are examples like $M “there, that place” coming from %YM “to place” and other words sometimes spelled with a sin, sometimes with a shin, but because this was never a research program I didn’t work up a list of these examples.

 

    But there is reasonable evidence that the letter for Het was used for two different sounds (Het and Chet) and that the letter for Ayin (Ayin and Gayin) also (ex: Gamorra and Gaza).

I don’t see any evidence for these within Biblical Hebrew. Rather I suspect that these speculations come from post-Biblical Hebrew and/or cognate languages.

 

  I believe that the Shin probably was for "Sh" and that when it was pronounced Sin that that was very similar to a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative.

I see no evidence that they were pronounced differently until during and after the Babylonian Exile, which would mean that Aramaic speaking Jews imported these distinctions from Aramaic.

Curious, what is the evidence that the Samekh was like an "X"?

I noticed that in the name “Artaxerxes” that the second “X” is spelled with a Samekh in Ezra and Nehemiah. The first “X” is spelled with a softer gutteral, a Chet, followed by a Sin, which would have sounded like an “X” to Greek ears.

Incidentally, Ezra spelled “Artaxerxes” with two Sins in Aramaic, suggesting that perhaps that Aramaic didn’t have a “X” phoneme at that time? And as Jews grew up speaking Aramaic without a “X” phoneme that they changed the Samekh to a Sin pronunciation.

David Kolinsky
Monterey, CA

Karl W. Randolph.