On Sun, 25 Jul 2010 05:30:05 +0200, "Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr> wrote:***
Actually we have plenty of evidence from Armenian, Hurro-Urartian and
Hittite on how these "letters" were pronounced in Akkadian in particular.
It's quite clear that the propagation of Hebrew phonetics into cuneiform was
inadequate and unfortunately probably impossible to emend. Cuneiform $
(=shin) is in fact -s- and Cuneiform s and z (tsamekh) is in fact -ts- and
-dz-. Anytime you move out of the Semitic "bubble", then it becomes clear
that there is a problem with graphemes $ and s which do not have the correct
values. It is also clear from Armenian that the emphatic s. in Akkadian was
an affricate. Place names and other words written with <s.> in Cuneiform
invariably pop up in Armenian with an affricate.
There is a fundamental problem in logic here. Transcribing X in language A
by Y in language B does not mean that X was pronounced as Y. If Armenian
(for example) transcribes an "emphatic" with an affricate, that does not
mean the "emphatic" was in fact realized as an affricate, only that when
faced with indicating a phonetic feature that was not present its own
language, some accommodation must be done, and how that problem is resolved
may be difficult to predict ahead of time.
This is the same situation with the so-called transcription of צ by Greek
τσ/ts.
***
The "aesthetical" argument was referring to your last sentence: "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."
"fit that model".
/s - S - z/ is actually /ts TS dz/.
Interesting idea. I take it that /s/ would still be in the phonemic
inventory corresponding to sin? What about plain /z/, do think that was
absent?
***
If the original value of tsamekh were /s/, then it's a wonder that this
letter has *never* been used anywhere from Greece to Ethiopia to Etruria to
write the sound /s/. As a matter of fact about everything has been used in
Greek to write /s/ except precisely that very letter. For that reason,
tsamekh cannot have been /s/, it was /ts/.
Thanks for the clarification. And in case I have given a wrong impression,
I'm not actually opposed to the idea that samekh may have been pronounced
[ts] at some point in its past, only that it's going too far to claim
that Egyptian transcriptions can "prove" such a pronunciation.
***
As far as Greek goes, the fact that shin became the basis of sigma I would
take as indicating that of the variety of sibilant letters available in
Phoenician at the time of the Greek adoption of the alphabet shin/sin was
closest to the Greek sound. This can be taken to mean that the Phoenician
sound of shin was [s], but it may also be the case that Greek sigma was
pronounced farther forward than the normal [s] as pronounced in English or
French. (It should be noticed that Modern Greek has such a pronunciation,
which makes it sound somewhat like an English sh.)
So, emphasizing again that I am not saying that samekh *wasn't* pronounced
[ts], the Greek evidence cannot prove that it was.
***
First of all, we *don't* have TS in the Codex Vaticanus in the text at all.
There are numerous occurrences of Hebrew name with sadhe transcribed with
simple sigma in the Vaticanus and other manuscripts of the LXX. The one
claimed use of tau+sigma is in a heading to the acrostical portion of
Lamentations, and that seems uncertain.
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