****but it's very unlikely that sadhe had the affricate> value [ts] when it was spoken as a mother tongue. The emphatics in
> Hebrew as in other Semitic languages form a series contrasting on one
> hand to unvoiced series and the other a voice series of obstruents. As
> far as I know, there are two attested phonetic realizations of > "emphatics",
> velarized/laryngealized type of Arabic, and the glottalized type of the
> African Semitic languages (more likely for Hebrew). In either case, we > have
> parallel series /s - S - z/ like /t -T - d/ like /k - K - g/. An > affricate
> like [ts] doesn't fit this model.
***
I would call that kind of argument an "aesthetical" one. That you can
nicely put phonemes in rows and columns is not a convincing proof of what
they might really be. I'm not a structuralist to the point of believing
that "structure rules".
Short of sending a phonetician back in time, there is unlikely to be
anything that can be called "proof", there's only the matter of lesser
or greater probability. Evidence of other Semitic languages is a lot
more convincing to me than a single Greek transcription where both the
reading itself and the evidentiary value is questionable. This is not
an "aesthetical" argument.
***
In addition, it's well known from Egyptian hieroglyphic that tsamekh was
nearly doubtless an affricate [ts] (S p r scribe => t_ p r and not **s p r
as is expected)
I would disagree about samekh being "nearly doubtless" [ts], certainly
not on the basis of Egyptian transcriptions, seeing that Egyptian
phonology is quite uncertain. (That Egyptian /t_/ indicated an affricate
seems quite unlikely considering its development in Coptic.) Even if
at some point samekh *were* an affricate, that would not be an argument
that sadhe was also.
and as a matter of that nearly all sibilants have been used
to write /s/ in Greek or Ethiopian but this precise one. So in fact if one
believes in "aesthetical" argumentation, the conclusion would rather be that
there is "systemic" support for an affricate /ts./ade because tsamekh was
itself /ts/.
This makes no sense. Are you referring to Egyptian transcriptions of
Greek and Ethiopic or something else?
***
It's a matter of certainly that Greek *did* develop affricates. They are
quite common in Modern Greek. *When* they developed is of course more
doubtful, but they are certainly seen in Byzantine Greek. Sources are
influence other languages, and internal phonetic developments (typically
as a result of palatalization).
****
> I mentioned above shin also as being transcribed by sigma. Apparently,
> according to my sigla, there is also an attempt to indicate shin more
> accurately in the Vaticanus, ρηχς/rekhs (resh) χσεν/khsen (shin).
> This isn't evidence that shin was pronounced something like [ks], only
> that the transcriber was trying desperately hard to find something that
> would suggest the Hebrew pronunciation.
> William Parsons
***
To some extent this is also an argument against emphasis being
pharyngeal or velar, or too much upward in the throat, as we would expect
this kind of graphic devices for tsade if it were the case.
Right - I'm not arguing for pharyngeal/velar interpretation of emphatics
in Hebrew.
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