From: David Steinberg <david.l.steinberg AT rogers.com>
To: Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>, b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Vocalization and reading of Biblical Hebrew
Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:14:30 -0500
Will
Thanks for your comment. I do not know how many homographs, assumed to
stand for phonologically distinct words, exist in Egyptian. Since
vocalized Coptic is very late Egyptologists may have no choice in how
they handle the language. However, in Hebrew we have multiple streams of
evidence (vowel letters; Amarna Canaaanite; Greek transcriptions;
Palestinian, Babylonian, and Tiberian pointing; modern pronunciation
traditions; closely cognate languages - Aramaic/Syriac, Arabic etc)
which often enable us to convincingly reconstruct a chain of
pronunciation developments from Proto-Semitic through Biblical Hebrew to
Tiberian Hebrew. It is therefore gratuitous to ignore all this evidence
and pretend that we have no idea of the original BH vocalization(s).
Take a look at <DBR> http://www.houseofdavid.ca/anc_heb_5.htm#orth .
Most of the distinctive MT vocalizations of <DBR> can easily be traced
back to distinctive reconstructed PS and probable BH forms. So does it
really make sense to ignore vowels that are probable and to pretend that
every instance of <DBR> is simply a hompgraph that might stand for "he
spoke", "it was said", "thing/word", "cattle plague" etc.?
David Steinberg
Ottawa, Canada
To pronounce any language one must use vowels, but it's not necessary to
assume a vocalization. Egyptologists do this all the time (perforce,
since Egyptian does not indicate vowels and there is no equivalent for
the Massoretic vowel points). So, an Egyptian word transcribed (slightly
simplifying) <sdmf> (approx. "he hears") is conventionally pronounced
/sedemef/, where the various e's have been inserted simply for the
purposes of making the word pronounceable, but with no illusions that
this is how the word was actually pronounced by Egyptians. I personally
would not take this approach to the Biblical text, but Karl has
indicated many times that he regards the Massoretic vowel pointing to be
so frequently wrong as to prefer to ignore it. Even if you don't agree
with this assessment, I don't think it's completely unreasonable, and if
one does so, one can readily apply the approach taken by Egyptologists
to Hebrew.