... Perhaps the words you cite remained the same, but at leastI deliberately chose words whose Shakespearean, modern British English, and American English pronunciations are very similar. The change from "colour" to "color" promoted by Noah Webster etc for American English was unrelated to pronunciation, motivated only by a desire for simplification and to make American English distinctive
"colour"'s spelling/pronunciation may be related to the GVS -- so that the
variant spelling convention does indicate an attempt to modernize after a
sound change.
there is indeed a possibility of a pronunciation difference (but then there is
that even if the spelling is unchanged) but also a very good chance that
the pronunciation was unchanged.
How do you measure this "good chance"? Or is it just a possibility that you
would like to think is a good chance?
...
Since sound changes happen all the time, ...
... and the spelling discloses
that there was most likely a difference in time between the spelling
convention of pre-exilic inscriptions and of the Bible in its current
consonantal spelling, we could similarly theorize that the
pronunciation changed, simply because it always does over time
(to varying degrees, of course). ...
... We have variant spellings of "day"
in the inscriptions: ym and ywm. Under such circumstances, we
might expect that final -o or -aw, even if written with an -h, might
sometimes be written as an -w by a less skilled scribe. But it's
pretty widely agreed that it isn't. ...
... So if you want to say that spelling
is simply not a good indicator of pronunciation ever, and we can't
learn much about pronunciation from spelling, because the spelling
may hide innovations, you will be left with the simple conclusion
that there probably were sound changes between the stage
represented by pre-exilic inscriptions and the stage represented by
the Massoretic Text, but we simply can't figure out what they were.
...
Or that they were not spelled with any letter in the end. That is, that
-o was simply not written in the pre-exilic inscriptions. In any case,
beyond the common cases of masculine possessive forms, what
other cases can you think of? I tried to think of other examples but
right now, they don't come to mind, and you say that they are very
common.
I don't know how well we know that -h can represent -o^, andThis seems improbable to me unless some explanation can be given for how
whether it is not based on the assumption that -h in pre-exilic
inscriptions was pronounced -o^ rather than as a consonant.
Sarfatti specifically mentions that -h came to represent -o^
because the above change (-ahu > -au > -o^) was not reflected
in the orthography.
-h came to represent -a and -e. The simplest hypothesis is that -h was
first written as a mater lectionis for any final vowel, or at least for
-a, -e and -o. The suggestion that its use for -o came about by a quite
different mechanism from its use for -a and -e is improbable by Occam's
Razor.
My impression, based on the similar use of the variant "he"-based sign for
feminine words in Arabic, is that -ah was originally consonantal as well, ...
... or
else why would Arabic not base its variant on the Alef? ...
... Note also the use
of final Alef in various names of Biblical persons from pre-exilic times that
are transliterated in foreign inscriptions with an -a. ...
... This leaves us with -hIt is very clear that final he was used in inscriptional Hebrew also for words with final -a, at least for words which are pronounced with final -a both in later Hebrew and in Arabic and Aramaic indicating that this was also the proto-NW Semitic pronunciation. So, while we can't be sure of the pre-exilic pronunciation, it is reasonable to assume that at least some final he's indicate a final -a pronunciation. Also, surely there are Hebrew names ending in he and now pronounced -a, such as Josiah, which are represented in Akkadian inscriptions; are these written with -e? Or are they always written with transcriptions of full -yahu endings?
for -e only, and while I'm not sure right now how widely this is used, it
cannot be used to claim that -h was the default "final vowel" indicator.
I would not call a change in spelling conventions a translation at all,
for there is no change in the spoken form.
Read again the article in the Cambridge History.
...
It's one more indication of the passage of time. That the different
spelling convention is later and is part of a whole bunch of changes
that reflected that passage in time. One of those changes would
be pronunciation.
...My point about the loan words was not that they are a parallel with the
Hebrew but to correct your error that Shakespeare would have pronounced
"Iuliet" with an initial I or Y sound, rather than J.
When did I ever say that?
Yet ityou wrote
> seems to me that by your method of reasoning the change of spelling
> implies that "Iuliet" must in fact have been pronounced "eye-oo-li-et".
It is a fact that the pronunciation was different:Perhaps you meant to say that the general pronunciation of English was different, as shown in this link but irrelevantly to my particular point. But what I thought you were actually claiming was that Shakespeare's pronunciation of "Iuliet" was different from the modern pronunciation of "Juliet", and commenting positively on my "eye-oo-li-et". But his pronunciation was not different, or only very subtly so.
http://www.bartleby.com/224/1502.html
Well, your original claim was that the differences of spelling convention, to which we have added some subtle lexical differences, proves that there was a time difference between inscriptional and biblical Hebrew. But such differences can easily by synchronic i.e. dialectal rather than diachronic. If you want to demonstrate that the differences are diachronic, you need to provide some evidence, rather than assert that a difference implies a time gap.That's not what I was saying. What I was suggesting was that pre-exilic
Hebrew, like almost any language, was not monolithic in its lexicon or
orthography, and so one would expect some variation between different
sources and different registers of language without interpreting this
variation as necessary evidence that they were composed at different times.
What it means, though, is that you accept that the epigraphic evidence
suggests 1) different spelling convention and 2) probably a slightly
different lexicon. In essence, that the evidence does imply what I am
saying. All you are saying is that perhaps there are reasons why we
should ignore this evidence -- for example, dialectical differences which
would require us to look at each inscription separately from all others.
Even if we found a whole library of late pre-exilic documents, this
wouldn't prove anything because perhaps there were dialectical
differences between this library and the Hebrew Bible that were in
existence already in this time. Well, yes, perhaps, but now your
position is one of saying that the evidence says one thing but you
say another, and that's not a very good position on which to stand.
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