Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Will:

On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 6:15 PM, Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu> wrote:

Hi Karl,

On Wed, 5 Dec 2012 16:15:15 -0800, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:
> Will:
>
> On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>>

>> …
>>
>> "Artaxerxes" is interesting, … but the Persian
>> forms they're based on, "Artakhshaça" and "Khshayarsha", are not so
>> strikingly similar.  … I'm not
>> sure what a "good" Greek rendering of "Artakhshaça" would be, …
>
> We’re speculating here, and are we even sure of Persian period
> pronunciation? The Greek transliterations are suggestive, and may represent
> an older pronunciation than what has come down to us through Persian
> sources.

We can't be sure of the pronunciation, but I would certainly trust the
Persian transcriptions of their own names to be better than a
foreigner's renditions in another language.

Here I was just raising a question, as I don’t know the history of the Persian language.

One thing I have noticed in a few languages where I know a little of their histories is that where languages have fluid spelling, that spelling tends to change to reflect changes in pronunciation of the language and the pronunciation reflected by the alphabet tends to remain constant. But where languages lock down their spellings, then as the language changes, the pronunciations reflected by their alphabets tend to change to reflect changes in their languages. This is not absolute, just tendency. Secondly, this tendency seems to be more true of consonants than vowels.

My understanding is that Greek up until fairly recently had fluid spelling, but what about Persian and Coptic? I read a little on the Coptic language history, which seems to indicate that Coptic froze its spelling a long time ago so that our modern understanding on how the Copts pronounced their words is most likely different than how the ancient Copts pronounced them.

I know nothing of Persian language history, so all I can do is raise questions.

…

Certainly the Phoenician alphabet underwent a considerable re-shaping
to make it a good vehicle for writing Greek, since Greek was quite
different from Phoenician.  But that's the point.  Just because xi
represents a cluster [ks] in Greek doesn't mean the Phoenician letter
from which it was borrowed represents a cluster.

Did the ancients recognize it as a cluster, or as a single phoneme? That they used one character to represent it, indicates that they recognized it as a single phoneme rather than a cluster. 

(Incidentally, the creation of the Greek alphabet may not be entirely
due to "the man on the street".  It very well could be that some of
the adaptions, such as the remarkable repurposing of consonantal
letters as vowels, was the brain-child of an ancient equivelent of
Cyril or Wulfila, one whose name has been lost to history.)

Possibly, though the repurposing of some consonants as vowels appear to have been the result of incomplete understanding of the alphabet. My understanding is that in Biblical era Hebrew, the alphabet was really a syllabary, but one that didn’t have a way to represent its vowels. The Greek man on the street understood that each letter stood for a phoneme, so his repurposing of softer gutturals representing phones not found in Greek could just as well been a result of misunderstanding as purposeful.

>>
>> Apart from what I've written above, I see as a more fundamental
>> problem with a consonant cluster like [ks] acting as a single phoneme
>> (and hence being represented by a single letter) in Hebrew (or other
>> Semitic languages).  If samekh *did* represent a cluster, then I would
>> expect to see at least some instances where samekh was used in words
>> where /k/ and /s/ as separate sounds happened to fall together, i.e.,
>> a parallel to Greek νυξ/nyx vs νυκτες/nyktes.
>
> Why? I see no reason that would be the case. Just because it was found in
> Greek doesn’t mean that it should be found in other languages. I don’t know
> where that is found in any language other than Greek.

This doesn't really have anything to do with the Greek language, but
with Greek spelling.  There's nothing in Greek that requires xi (or
psi) to exist, and the fact that they are used is a peculiarity of
Greek orthography, without any deep significance.

See above about phonemic spelling. That the ancient Greeks apparently wrote phonemically, their inclusion of these “consonant clusters” as individual letters shows that they considered them as phonemes, not as consonant clusters.

Incidentally, your example for the Greek Xi changing to a Kappa in certain situations has its correspondence in other languages, for example in English, the en- as in energize become em- before a labial as in embattle. And we could probably find many similar examples. This is consonantal substitution that sometimes happens where there are found consonantal clusters.

For an example other than Greek, look at Coptic.  Coptic uses the
Greek alphabet supplemented with additional letters for sounds not
found in Greek, but Coptic phonology is different from Greek in many
particulars.  The Greek letters Φ/phi, Θ/theta, Χ/khi were originally
used in Greek for aspirated stop phonemes.

Other than Coptic, what is your evidence for this? I’m not saying you’re wrong, at least not directly, I’m just raising a question. But so far, the only evidence I have seen for this assertion is very questionable.

 

 Coptic apparently did not
have aspirated stops, but it did have consonant clusters that could
include an /h/ phoneme.  Not surprisingly, phi, &c. were used in the
numerous Greek loanwords in Coptic, but also, perhaps more
surprisingly, in native Coptic words to represent a consonant
cluster.  For example:

/p/   = masculine definite article
/ho/  = face
/pho/ = "the face", spelled ΦΟ, with a phi.

That could also reflect that when this spelling was adopted, that there was a real difference in pronunciation that was later changed, that this represented a consonantal substitution that sometimes happens when languages have consonantal clusters. 

This is parallel to the Greek use of xi and psi, but (and this is my
point) we do not see anything similar in Phoenician or Hebrew for
samekh.

You do find it in Masoretic and later Hebrew as indicated by their points, but not Biblical era Hebrew. If Biblical era Hebrew was a syllabary, as I think the majority of the evidence seems to indicate, then there were no consonantal clusters, therefore no consonantal substitution in consonantal clusters as in languages such as Greek and English.

--
Will Parsons
μη φαινεσθαι, αλλ' ειναι.

Karl W. Randolph.

μη φαινεσθαι, αλλα ποιαι.   (Isn’t that better?) ……;-)