***
The point was not that Hebrew wasn't spoken over a compact area, but that a
small area doesn't preclude there being significant dialectal differences.
One can point to numerous examples of "small" languages where there are (or
were) significant differences in dialect from village to village.
Much more***
important than physical area is the mobility of the population. Greek became
*less* differentiated dialectally as it expanded outward in the wake of
Alexander's conquests.
In the case of Hebrew, it's harder to judge than Greek***
both because of the much more limited evidence and the fact that the using a
defective method of indicating vowels could conceal major differences in
pronunciation.
******
Akkadian tsade and tsade cuneiform signs are doubtless an affricate as it is
rendered as affricates in other languages, which have the distinction
affricate / non affricate.
Cuneiform S was probably just s
Cuneiform s, z and s. are affricates.
So I suppose it must have been an affricate in the original proto-Semitic
(and before).
A.
***
We've covered this before in another thread. Rendering X in language A by Y
in language B doesn't prove that X is pronounced Y in A if B doesn't have
an equivalent to X. So, no "doubtless an affricate", &c. Making dogmatic
statements about details of Akkadian phonology (let alone Proto-Semitic!) is
simply not justified.
William Parsons
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