Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Vocalization and reading of Biblical Hebrew
Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 17:31:14 -0500 (EST)
David,
On Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:14:30 -0500, David Steinberg
<david.l.steinberg AT rogers.com> wrote:
>
> Will
> Thanks for your comment. I do not know how many homographs, assumed
> to stand for phonologically distinct words, exist in Egyptian.
It's probably comparable to Hebrew, considering only the consonantal
text.
> Since
> vocalized Coptic is very late Egyptologists may have no choice in how
> they handle the language.
As I stated.
> 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).
I don't deny this - my point was it's possible to read and pronounce Hebrew
without assuming a particular vocalization. I'm not arguing that it's
desirable to do so, but note that choosing to do this doesn't necessarily mean
that one is denying (e.g.) that there was a phonological distinction between
qal and pi``el forms, only that one doesn't trust the manuscript tradition
enough to reflect that distinction.