Rochelle:
First of all, I have to thank you for linking to articles that are
open to all to look at. All too often on this discussion list articles
are referenced, but when I click on them, I find them behind a
firewall open only to those who are part of the academic system, which
I am not.
>[snip]
>
> >Going back to the example of Latin, it is still a living language in
> >that it is still spoken, literature is still written in it, including
> >poetry. True, the uses of Latin are but a fraction of how it was used
> >400 years ago, but even 400 years ago, no one learned Latin at his
> >mother's knee, yet Latin was spoken, literature written in it, some
> >international agreements were written in Latin, and if you go 200
> >years prior to that, almost everything of importance was written in
> >Latin and almost all legal, trade and scholarly discussion was spoken
> >in Latin.
>
> Latin was the "lingua franca" in the West right into the 19th-century and
> is still a required language in many fields.. You are comparing apples and
> oranges.
>
That's exactly how I understand Hebrew functioned among the widely dispersed Jewish population at least until well into the Talmudic period. Thus it was a sign of an educated person that he use Hebrew in his communications, even of a wife kvetching to her husband where the use of Hebrew is more likely to grab his attention.
> >Returning to Hebrew, in all of the examples you gave, which one cannot
> >be an example of use the same way as Latin is used?
>
> To name just one among those mentioned: The Genizah documents - We can
> hardly expect a wife to write a letter to her husband complaining about
> his lengthy absence in a dead language, now can we.
Did I ever say that Hebrew was a dead language?
Even among Christians, knowledge of Hebrew is considered a sign of a well educated Christian
(honored more in the breech than practice, even among theologians) as well as koiné Greek, which would not be the case if Hebrew were a dead language. The question is, did it live in the same manner as medieval Latin, or learned at one's mother's knee?
> I have a complete > listing of all documents from the Genizah that are in Hebrew or Hebrew and
> Aramaic oi Aramaic. It runs abut 400 pages. If you want an exact figure on > how many are in Hebrew, I'll be going over the list in about a week or so and will be delighted to let you know when I have completed compiling the > information that I need. I can run a check on the Hebrew for you at the same time...
> That would be appreciated, if not too much trouble.
> >As far as I can remember, I have never said that Hebrew was not
> >spoken, rather the evidence I have seen so far is that Hebrew was not
> >taught at one's mother's knee, rather that those who spoke it, spoke
> >it as a legal, high literature, religious, trade, etc. language, one
> >that they learned at school, the same as medieval Latin.
>
> See the Genizah note. Kvetching about a husband wandering about in a
> personal letter is hardly "legal, high literature, religious, trade, etc.
> language."
>
But it is the sign of an educated person. While I have not made a
study of such, I have heard (hearsay) that similar examples exist in
medieval Latin.
To give a similar example, for centuries official Chinese was written in a language that no one spoke. Local varieties of Chinese languages developed their own subsets of characters for words not found in that official language, so, for example, it is possible to write complete sentences in Cantonese using characters not found in Mandarin. But a well educated person would consistently write in official language, even if she were a woman writing to her husband.
> Second, the script design of the Paleo- frags is NOT an archaization; those
> frags are actually archaic. That pushes their date back to at least the 5th
> century and they may be pre-exilic "treasures" that had been safe-guarded
> for centuries..
>
Though in one of your articles, you mentioned that that was improbable
that they are pre-exilic.
> Now, although the variant forms are relevant to the topic of this list --
> after all, the Greek symbol assignments tell us what phoneme was attached
> to what form, I am quite certain that list-members are tired of this
> thread; shall we get back to B-Hebrew?
>
I still have some questions:
Who had the alphabet first: the Phoenicians or the Hebrews?
If the Phoenicians, what writing system did Moses use when he wrote Torah in the second half of 15th century BC? Is there any documentary evidence to back up your opinion?
I suspect that the Roman alphabet did not come directly from the
Phoenicians, nor through the Greeks, rather theirs is a cursive that
appears to have come from a different tradition than Phoenician.
In particular the letters R and S give that impression, as they are
closer to proto-Sinaitic examples than are those from Phoenician.
I find that the Yadi example somewhat weak, as the lines are not
straight nor evenly spaced.
There is also the question, languages that invent alphabetic writing systems tend to have one grapheme per recognized phoneme, while those that adopt alphabetic systems from
other languages, even close cognate languages, tend to find the adopted alphabet more or less an ill fit. So could what you see actually be examples of evidences for an ill fitting alphabet that was
adopted from another language?
Again, in one of your articles, you claim that only a small portion of the people went into exile but that the majority of Jews remained in Judea. Where is your documentation for that claim? Contemporary documents that I have seen claim that the land was completely depopulated, the elites to Babylon while the poor of the land to Egypt. The contemporary documents lend credence to my claim that it is very possible that those who returned after the exile were more at
home in Aramaic, even in their pronunciation of Hebrew, than pre-exilic Biblical Hebrew. Thus post-exilic documents cannot give us a guide as to how Biblical Hebrew was pronounced.
Karl W. Randolph
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