Abu Rashid wrote: > Today Hebrew has lost a few more phonemes, so it's > only really sin/shin which are still doing a double job.
For one who speaks both Hebrew and Arabic, shin-sin is the one letter that most obviously has more than one sound. Hebrew words with an SH-sound are often parallel to Arabic words with an S-sound and vice-versa. The shalom-salaam pair is perhaps the best known. When dots are used, the shin has a dot on your right; the sin has a dot on your left. But, for better or worse, modern Hebrew has other letters that are doing "double duty". When dots are used, the presence-absence of a dot also produces the following pairs of sounds: bet: B - V (usually B in initial position) vav: vowel oo (dot at middle on your left) *or* oh (dot at top) - V kaf: K, Kh (often K in initial position and Kh elsewhere) peh: P - F (usually P in initial position and F elsewhere) tof: T - S (but now always T in Israeli Hebrew) The absence-presence of an apostrophe after the letter produces the following pairs of sounds. gimel: G - J dalet: D - dh (as in then) zaiyin: Z - zh (as in measure, pleasure, azure) tet: T - th (as in thin) tzadi: TS - ch (as in cheese) For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet In modern Hebrew, the five letters whose shape is different in final position (khaf, mem, nun, feh, tzadi) usually have the same sound in middle and final position. I suspect this was not true in ancient times. [Arabic letters] may exhibit four distinct forms (initial, medial, final or isolated). However, 6 letters have only isolated or final form, and so force the following letter (if any) to take an initial or isolated form, as if there were a word break. For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet Abu Rashid also wrote: > [Hebrew] is one of the most evolved and developed of > the Semitic languages, having lost many of the original > Semitic features and sounds. I think the members of this group should be interested in the changes in the sounds of Hebrew letters that have occurred over time. Most of these changes are probably due to close contact with other cultures, especially Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek, and Roman. I will list the changes that I am aware of. The *het *(without a schwa under it) usually appears in English as a W (via Germanic) and less often as an X (via classical Greek and Latin). The W in chinaware is the het in kHaR-SiNa (from kHeReS = pottery, clay). Today we have hardware and software but the earliest wares for sale were divrei kheres = things of clay. The het may have lost its W-sound during the period of Greek dominance of the region. Ancient Greek lost its originally 6th letter that had a W-sound. That letter is now called digamma because it looked like a gamma on top of another gamma, quite like the English letter F. It was replaced by an apostrophe to represent a breathing sound that is now usually transliterated as H. The *aleph* had a het-like GHT/CHS-sound. That explains why the Rashi-script aleph looks like a het + chupchik. If aleph = GHT, the 2nd word in Tanakh, bet-resh-aleph, is seen to be cognate with BRouGHT (forth). One can retain this ancient aleph sound by substituting the letters het-shin. For example, the root het-shin-bet means to think (in a logical sequence) and to count (1, 2, ...), that is, to aleph-bet something. kHaSHMaL het-shin-mem-lamed occurs in Tanakh only in the book of Ezekiel (YekHeZKeL) with the meaning "color of amber". Replacing the het-shin with an aleph and giving the mem an MB-sound produces @aMBaL, cognate with amber. Sometimes this word is translated as electrum, an alloy of gold and silver with the same color. In many languages, the word for "electricity" is derived from amber, which has static electricity. The *shin*'s ancient T-sound explains why the Rashi-script shin looks like a tet turned 90 deg. clockwise and why today's handwritten shin looks like a closed tet. This makes SHeN = tooth cognate with Latin dent- and LaSHoN = tongue cognate with "Latin," the tongue of the Romans. The ancient *heh* had a dalet+heh sound. This explains why the definite article is heh in Hebrew but "the" in English and makes the Hebrew word ToRaH cognate with truth. The consonantal *vav *had an PH / F-sound. For example, the Greek word phasis (phase of the moon) was borrowed into Hebrew as vav-samekh-sof (VeSeT = menstruation). Giving the het its W-sound and the vav its F-sound means that Adam was calling his wife het-vav-heh WaFath or wife. The *yod* is often parallel to a G via Germanic, a K via Greek, and a hard C or CR via Latin. Yod-resh-het = moon is parallel to GRoW via Germanic and AncLatin KReX which metathesized to cresc- from which we get increase (grow larger), decrease (grow smaller), crescendo (grow louder), crescent (moon-shaped) and croissant (a moon-shaped pastry). Knowing the ancient sounds of the yod, heh and vav enables one to understand the simple but meaningful semantics of YHVH. See http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/read/ABOUT-WORDS/2004-03/1080368844 Ciao (perhaps cognate with tzadi-aleph = to exit), Izzy
