>----- Original Message -----
>From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
>
>> >>On 07/10/2003 23:00, Karl Randolph wrote:
>>
>>>Dear Peter:
>>>
>>>How do you know that it is not Arabic from over a thousand years later
that split one root into two? ...
>>>
>>Because such things don't happen, within the rather well understood >>processes of how languages change over time.
>> >Oh? Languages sometimes add phonemes, sometimes reduce phonemes, over time. Who can predict which way an individual language will go?
> No one can predict what will happen. But anyone can predict that there are certain things which are very unlikely to happen, on the basis that they have not been observed in any of the well studied language groups e.g. Indo-European, Semitic etc, or in any other less well known group. One of those processes which does not occur, as I understand it, is the splitting of one phoneme into two apart from when it is conditioned by the phonological environment.
>>>... Even with post-Biblical Hebrew, we see that one letter, sin, was split
into two: sin and shin, ...
>>>
>>No, as Trevor has explained. Sin and shin were always pronounced >>differently, but were written with one letter because there was no >>separate letter available for sin.
>>
>You have no evidence for this claim.
> The evidence is in the scholarly reconstruction of the history of the Semitic languages, which has a similar status to the reconstruction of the history of Germanic, Greek etc which you mention below although there is equally "no evidence" for what you repeat as fact. For if we don't accept as evidence for pronunciation the various written forms which have survived, we are left with no evidence at all for the history of language, before the invention of sound recording and phonetic transcription.
>>Karl, it is clear that you have very little idea of how languages change >>over time. Please study some comparative linguistics, history of Semitic >>languages etc, and weigh carefully the evidence used for their >>reconstructions, before presuming to know these things better than me, a >>trained linguist, and than the experts in this field whose theories I >>have summarised.
>
>Peter, you neither know me nor what I have studied. It seems that Proverbs
18:13 fits this situation. I make no presumptions on your studies and learning.
>
I'm sorry if I failed to acknowledge your qualifications. However, it remains clear to me that you misunderstand this subject.
>If Moses wrote Torah about 1400 BCE as tradition avers (and I see no reason
to doubt this tradition), then it follows that the alphabet more closely follows
the pronunciation and linguistic structure of the period than any other period
or language.
>
Well, the theory that Moses invented the Semitic alphabet no longer seems tenable as there is evidence for it from earlier than Moses could have lived. That implies that Moses (or whoever) took an existing alphabet which was not necessarily adequate to represent all the sounds of Hebrew, just as the English alphabet, taken from the Latin, is not and never was adequate to represent all the sounds of English.
--
--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/
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