On 25/11/2006 06:33, K Randolph wrote:There are more options, but one is that West Semitic innovated the
> ...
> In West Semitic, but we are discussing Biblical Hebrew, and the
> evidence indicates that sin and shin were one letter with one
> pronunciation in Biblical times.
>
Well, if you accept that sin and shin were separate in West Semitic, but
insist that they were one letter in biblical Hebrew, let's see what that
implies. It must be one of the following:
1. Biblical Hebrew is not related to West Semitic, despite that fact
that you can read and understand West Semitic (Phoenician); I can't
believe that even you insist on that.
2. Biblical Hebrew has a common ancestor with West Semitic in which sin
and shin were distinct (this is the normal scholarly position), and West
Semitic preserved the distinction, whereas biblical Hebrew lost the
distinction, but it reappeared later, before the time of the Masoretes.
3. Biblical Hebrew has a common ancestor with West Semitic in which sin
and shin were not distinct; West Semitic innovated the distinction in
ancient times, and Hebrew separately innovated the distinction in
post-biblical times, before the time of the Masoretes.
... You
also refer to "the paucity of roots differentiated by shin and sin, as
rare as what is expected if they originally were one letter, not two".
But is this actually true? Just looking at words (not roots, verbs
written unpointed) starting with sin or shin, we have the following pairs:
$B( / &B(
$BR / &BR
$GG / &GG
$GH / &GH
$DD / &DD
$WX / &WX
$W+ / &W+
$WR / &WR
$XH / &XH
$X+ / &X+
$XQ / &XQ
$YX, $IYXFH / &YX, $IYXFH
$KK / &KK
$KL / &KL
$KR / &KR
$N) / &N)
$(R, $A(AR / &(R, &A(AR
$QD / &QD
$QR / &QR
$RH, $FRFH / &RH, &FRFH
$RR / &RR
My hypothesis, that in Hebrew the split was applied from another
Now I accept that there are many roots in biblical Hebrew which are
homonyms (although most of these are easily explainable by hypothesising
loss of phonemes from earlier forms of the language), also that some of
the pairs I have listed may not be clearly semantically distinct (I
haven't looked at definitions, only a list of lemmas). But your
hypothesis would have to explain not only why there are so many of these
pairs but also how they came to split apart in a consistent way when (on
your hypothesis) sin and shin split apart.
I note also the extreme rarity of words starting with sin - lamed, which
to me is most easily explained by avoidance of two lateral sounds
together, thus strongly suggesting that sin had some kind of lateral
sound at the time when sin and shin were distinguished.
...There are indications that ancient trade was much more extensive and
> Now the question is: was the 22 letter alphabet tailor made for
> Biblical Hebrew, or was it adopted from another language? One way to
> answer that is to answer who had that alphabet first?
>
> We see from ancient graffiti and inscriptions that southern Arabian
> languages' alphabets shared a similar root as Biblical Hebrew but had
> a different set of letters, corresponding to their different number of
> phonemes while many of the letters are shared. I suspect that the Wadi
> al Hol graffiti were southern Arabian, not equivalent to Hebrew.
>
>
Unlikely. It is known that the Egyptians had close contacts with Canaan
and that the many Semites living in Egypt at that time were largely from
Canaan. Egyptian links with south Arabia, i.e. modern Yemen and Oman,
were much more obscure. Meanwhile the letter shapes of the earliest
surviving inscriptions from Canaan strongly suggest derivation from
Egyptian hieroglyphs, and so that they were derived in a similar way to
the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions if not provably directly linked.
> While the ancient Phoenicians were far more prolific in their graffitiWhile the ancient copyists were willing to play with font faces, such
> and stone inscriptions than Hebrew writers, there is evidence that
> their use of the 22 letter alphabet was adopted from Hebrew instead of
> the other way around. Their widespread use dates from about the time
> of King David and they use a cursive from about that time. Hebrew was
> historically credited with having the alphabet from centuries earlier,
> but written on scrolls that have not survived.
>
> Because Moses' use of writing dates from about the same time as the
> earliest attested use of a similar alphabet among southern Arabian but
> with 22 letters instead of the more numerous but mostly shared letters
> found among southern Arabians, that indicates that the 22 letters
> corresponded to 22 recognized consonantal phonemes of Biblical Hebrew.
> In other words, that the alphabet was developed, i.e. tailor made, for
> Biblical Hebrew.
>
>
Of course even if we grant that Moses wrote down the Torah, we don't
know that he wrote it in anything like the 22 letter script that we know
today. It may originally have been written with more (or fewer) letter
distinctions and later copied into the alphabet used later. But even if
we grant that the Torah is the oldest surviving document in the 22
letter script, that by no means implies that it was the first such
document. It may well be that the 22 letter script had become widespread
among the Semites in Egypt at the period (but using perishable writing
materials) and was based on a phonetically simplified form of NW Semitic
used as a kind of trade language between the different Semitic groups,
while the Hebrews and maybe other such groups kept their own
phonetically more rich versions.
I'll admit that some of the "can't" is attitudinal, but it still
> ...
Yes, linguists and language learners have to be trained to recognise and
produce phones from previously unfamiliar languages, and after a certain
age this becomes more difficult. Like learning Hebrew, it is difficult,
but not impossible. That is why I reject your "some people can't",
unless because of specific disability.
--I still think that a lot of the speculation concerning linguistic
Peter Kirk
E-mail: peter AT qaya.org
Blog: http://speakertruth.blogspot.com/
Website: http://www.qaya.org/
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