Yitzhak
The modern inventory of Proto-Semitic sounds is as follows ...
This is not very different from Rabin's table. In fact, he references
various possibilities including the ones you mention, and rejects
several of them.
In any case, my point in bringing this up was that although in
proto-Semitic
there were triplets, interchanging the consonants from the triplets
did change the meaning of the word. This is NOT the case for bgdkpt.
(Of course our friend Isaac will probably add that some of these
changes might have only "somewhat" changed the meaning.)
Some of these sounds remained in use for a long time.http://sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/JBL1242.pdf
See Steiner's article here:
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