Karl,
I think you seriously misunderstood my argument. I want to wrap this
up so I'll not make any new arguments or re-hash old points, but will
summarize in one place what I've previously written as follows:
1) Just because Greek xi has its origin in Phoenician/Hebrew samekh
and represents the cluster /ks/, doesn't necessarily mean that
samekh was also pronounced [ks].
o Greek and Phoenician/Hebrew had quite different phonologies.
o One therefore shouldn't expect exact correspondences and read
back into Phoenician/Hebrew the Greek values.
2) Use of a single letter to represent a phonetic sequence, such as is
the case with xi, doesn't necessarily imply that the letter
represents a single phoneme. That [ks] was not a single phoneme in
Greek is shown by:
o Internal evidence within Greek itself, e.g., helix (/heliks/)
vs. plural helikes. (Note there is no "sound change" involved
here, xi didn't "turn into" kappa - the final /k/ of stem is
unchanged in both singular and plural.)
o Explicit descriptions by ancient grammarians.
3) Greek is not unique in using single letters to represent sequences
of phonemes.
o Coptic provides additional examples, similar in type to Greek,
where internal evidence shows a single letter representing a
sequence of phonemes across a morpheme boundary.
4) Unlike Greek Ξ and Coptic Φ or +, there is no internal evidence
that samekh represented a sequence of phonemes. (That [ks] could
represent a single phoneme is itself unlikely, since I know of *no*
languages where this is the case, certainly not either Greek or
English.)
o There are, for example, no examples of samekh representing a
sequence of /k/ and /s/ that happen to come together in an
internal cluster. (Yes, I know *you*, Karl, do not think there
*were* consonantal clusters in the interior of Hebrew words, but
I, with most others, do.)
5) Conclusion: There is little reason to think that samekh
represented [ks] and good reason to think it did not.
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