On 10/03/2004 11:00, Karl Randolph wrote:�
>Peter:
>
>What I rejected was not Hebrew phonological >reconstruction per se, but a particular theory >of phonological reconstruction.
>
>Admittedly, the evidence I have is pretty >sketchy, pretty much restricted to Tanakh and >the New Testament.
> All I can say is that you are rejecting a theory based on a lot of evidence and centuries of scholarly work for one of your own based on "pretty sketchy" evidence. You may be right, but unless you can find good evidence for it you really need to qualify statements like "There was a consonental pronunciation change" with something like "in my opinion" or "according to my theory".
�
There is STRONG evidence that there was NOT a bifurcation of sin and shin, but that these were always pronounced differently in Hebrew (though not perhaps in Phoenician from where the alphabet was borrowed). But we have been through this one before. For a survey of the more generally held theory, see the following extract from Henry Churchyard's dissertation (available from http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/), pp.152-153:
> Thus in Churchyard (1993:333,335) I have assembled references which > indicate that until the last few centuries of the 1st millennium > B.C.E. á1¡ [sin] remained distinct from s (and Å¡) in Hebrew, while > Proto-Semitic *ḥ and *ḫ (IPA [χ]) also remained distinct sounds, as > did Proto-Semitic *Ê• and *Ä¡ (IPA [Ê]); while in Old Aramaic of the > early 1st millennium B.C.E., all these sounds remained distinct, and > in addition Proto-Semitic *θ, *ð, and *θ̣ (or “*ẓâ€) had not merged with > any other sounds. Yet when the North Semitic 22-letter alphabet − > devised to represent some dialect (Phoenician?) in which these sounds > had merged − was adopted in the early 1st. millennium B.C.E. to > represent Hebrew and Old Aramaic, no attempts were made to remedy the > orthographic inadequacies that resulted from having fewer letters in > the alphabet than there were consonant phonemes in the languages.
I have not seen any evidence which contradicts the theory you rejected, only doubts cast on the reliability of some of the evidence for it and of the scholars who have presented it.
--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/
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