Peter:
After all, this is the B-Hebrew list, so why shouldn?t we limit this discussion to Biblical Hebrew?
What steamed me is to read that, based on this postulated proto-Semitic, Biblical Hebrew was different from what we should expect from looking at the unpointed text. It steamed me because it is taking concepts from outside of Biblical Hebrew and making it more authoritative than the surviving texts.
Do you suppose that when Phoenician and Aramaic adopted the 22 character Hebrew alphabet, ...
... that they adopted it unchanged because they shared the same set of consonantal phonemes at that time? (That?s just a throw out question, I don?t intend to discuss it at length.)No, for adoption in either direction. English borrowed the Latin alphabet unchanged (and later added three new letters as adaptations of existing ones) although the phoneme inventories were quite different. Similarly for Greek borrowing Phoenician etc etc.
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