Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Will:

On Sun, Dec 9, 2012 at 1:01 PM, Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu> wrote:

Karl,

I think you seriously misunderstood my argument.  I want to wrap this
up so I'll not make any new arguments or re-hash old points, but will
summarize in one place what I've previously written as follows:

1) Just because Greek xi has its origin in Phoenician/Hebrew samekh
   and represents the cluster /ks/, doesn't necessarily mean that
   samekh was also pronounced [ks].

I never said it does, only that those are two of a few clues that indicate a probability.

   o  Greek and Phoenician/Hebrew had quite different phonologies.

Irrelevant, unless we are talking about that they didn’t have that sound at all. They had this sound, so they kept the letter.

   o  One therefore shouldn't expect exact correspondences and read
      back into Phoenician/Hebrew the Greek values.

Phoenician and Biblical Hebrew are two dead languages where the pronunciations were at least partially forgotten. Greek is a language whose history is more likely to have retained at least the consonantal pronunciations pretty much intact. Therefore reading back is not a proof, but a clue.

2) Use of a single letter to represent a phonetic sequence, such as is
   the case with xi, doesn't necessarily imply that the letter
   represents a single phoneme.  That [ks] was not a single phoneme in
   Greek is shown by:

   o  Internal evidence within Greek itself, e.g., helix (/heliks/)
      vs. plural helikes.  (Note there is no "sound change" involved
      here, xi didn't "turn into" kappa - the final /k/ of stem is
      unchanged in both singular and plural.)

Notice also that the spelling indicated the difference in pronunciation. Whether we are dealing with phoneme substitution or something else is irrelevant to the question.

   o  Explicit descriptions by ancient grammarians.

One that you mentioned and his school, but was he accurate? Do we understand him accurately? If he were to use modern English phonetics terminology, would he have said, “This is a phoneme made up of two phones that have the same sounds as the phonemes ‘k’ and ‘s’̊”?  Would the average literate man on the street have agreed with him? Anyways it is irrelevant to the question. 

3) Greek is not unique in using single letters to represent sequences
   of phonemes.

Are we dealing with a sequence of phonemes, or a single phoneme made up of a sequence of phones? 

Unless we are dealing with a possible clue for Hebrew pronunciation, irrelevant to this discussion. 

   o  Coptic provides additional examples, similar in type to Greek,
      where internal evidence shows a single letter representing a
      sequence of phonemes across a morpheme boundary.

4) Unlike Greek Ξ and Coptic Φ or +, there is no internal evidence
   that samekh represented a sequence of phonemes.  (That [ks] could
   represent a single phoneme is itself unlikely, since I know of *no*
   languages where this is the case, certainly not either Greek or
   English.)

While the phonetics classes I took were lower level, they did mention that there is a difference between a phoneme and a phone. Further, they mentioned that one phoneme may include a combination of phones. “X” in English is single phoneme, even though it is made up of two phones. “Ax” is different from “ass” recognizable by the different phonemes used.

Getting back to Biblical Hebrew—it’s clear that its speakers considered Samekh a single phoneme, the question is, how did they pronounce it?

   o  There are, for example, no examples of samekh representing a
      sequence of /k/ and /s/ that happen to come together in an
      internal cluster.  (Yes, I know *you*, Karl, do not think there
      *were* consonantal clusters in the interior of Hebrew words, but
      I, with most others, do.)

This statement seems off the wall, in light of what is written above it.

(I’m not alone in thinking that Biblical Hebrew probably didn’t have consonantal clusters, though I came to that conclusion independently of anyone else. Waltke & O’Conner mention that as well.)

5) Conclusion:  There is little reason to think that samekh
   represented [ks] and good reason to think it did not.

Your reasoning is based on faulty presuppositions leading to a faulty conclusion. No, it represented a single phoneme that was probably a combination of two phones “k” and “s”. That those two phone separately also are used as phonemes is irrelevant, this doesn’t represent two phonemes coming together, rather it’s a single phoneme.

Karl W. Randolph.