Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Beginner questions about hard/soft pronunciations of bgdkpt
Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:54:22 -0800
Gabe:
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Gabe Eisenstein
<gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>wrote:
> Traffic seems low so I thought I'd sneak in a dumb beginner's question
> -- actually two related questions representing areas of my ignorance.
>
Don't sweat the "beginner" part, you know a lot more Hebrew than some of
this list. After all, we all were beginners at one point of our studies.
>
> The second concerns the rules for reading hard vs. soft b/g/d/k/p/t when
> you are looking at text without points (dagesh).
There are, but it was from reading the text without points that I came to
the conclusion that when Biblical Hebrew was spoken, that there was no
difference — that all the consonants were hard.
> I found a chart online that seemed to suggest that some of the hard/soft
> differences didn't exist in BH, but emerged later. Is that right?
>