Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] comparative historical linguistics was Re: Nun-Tav-Vet root
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 10:21:44 +0000
On 29/11/2006 03:48, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
...
This is not what I asked. First of all, a "Rosetta stone" usually isn't
one language, two scripts -- it's two languages or more and probably
just as many scripts. ...
Actually the original Rosetta stone has three scripts and two languages:
Greek and two different scripts for Egyptian. But of course we don't
have any kind of Rosetta stone for pre-monarchic Hebrew, so the point is
moot. The best we have is the Amarna correspondence and the Ugaritic
parallels which Yitzhak mentiones. We do of course have some kind of
inter-script Rosetta stone for Ugaritic itself in that we have the same
language, and I think sometimes the same texts, in both alphabetic and
syllabic cuneiform. Similarly but from a much later period, we have some
Hebrew texts preserved in palaeo-Hebrew among the DSS as well as in
square Hebrew, so we can use these as direct confirmation of the
correspondence between these scripts - which had already been
established well before the discovery of the DSS.