| Hi Will, To be honest I am using the term native speaker more broadly. It is a current debate between theologians and linguists whether the science of modern linguistics can be applied to BH. The main reason is that when a linguist studies a modern tongue, he/she has the luxury of filtering the data through a native speaker. For example, native feedback allows the linguist to distinguish an allophone from a phoneme. With BH we can't interview the Masoretes directly. But I do believe that it is well established that they were preserving their tradition, that is, what they received as a long tradition of pronunciation. In this light, the Masoretic pointing is a linguistic goldmine. If they pointed the Heb text within an Aramaic framework, the text would show much more consistency. Instead, morphological studies are showing that variation is mostly due to geographical/dialectical variation. See Gary A. Rendsburg's essay "Morphological Evidence for Regional Dialects in Ancient Hebrew" in Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew, edited by Walter R. Modine. Jonathan Mohler On Jan 9, 2013, at 8:09 PM, Will Parsons wrote:
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