...
Peter, if you want to reject the existence of begedkefet pairs, of bet and... or plosification. ...Of course not, because this exists only in your imagination.
vet, this is ridiculous. They do exist. ...
Gemination in LXX is only post-tonic, thus natural. I'm talking of kal.
Dagesh "causes" gemination, but dagesh does not "mean" gemination, rather a
stop. ...
...
Perhaps I should reiterate my position; it is not far from yours, actually.
I don't believe that begedkefet pairs existed at the time of the Masoretes.
Strict (unaspirated) plosive begedkefet's appeared when inter-consonantal
schwa became silent. At about the same time, begedkefet's in other positions
became more aspirated than before, and eventually fricativised. Possibly
this happened under the influence of modern European languages, or to better
distinguish "normal" begedkefet's from second-in-a-row ones. This process
created begedkefet pairs.
I therefore believe that both dagesh kal and hazak originally caused only
gemination. Only later, when inter-consonantal schwa became silent,
gemination was replaced with plosification (in the sense of aspirated
plosives becoming unaspirated).
Why the dagesh kal was only applied to begedkefet? To answer this question,
ask why the Masoretes needed dagesh kal. The likely answer is, to avoid
"eating" the second-in-a-row consonant. Why, then, of all consonants, only
begedkefet's tended to be "eaten"? Because they were more aspirated than
others.
...Because by that time other Semitic languages were developing in isolation, or dying. Of course in Arabic pe/fe was fricativised in all positions at some time, so was gimel/jim in most dialects.
If this was a phonetic process, why did not it affect other Semitic
languages, where the word-initial does not differ in aspiration?
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