Karl, You honor me by assuming that I know the answer to your questions. However let me give you my opinion: there is no reason to believe that the whole population was exiled. And those who remained must have continued their normal speech, which indeed eventually changed. There is no reason to assume that those in exile drastically changed the pronounciation of the language they learned from their parents, even if they adopted a new one.
Clear written evidence of separate letters for separate sibilants exists in Ugaritic, a close relative of Hebrew. The latest written evidence from this older Semitic language predates the most ancient Hebrew texts by several centuries. I mentioned other evidence in a previous post. So there is no need to assume that the differentiation between the sibilants is post-exilic. We simply don't have enough evidence for fully reconstructing the development of the pronounciation in the periods that interest you. Look at the similar case of ancient Egyptian. Despite vast amount of written material which exists for that language, pronounciation is often uncertain. On the other hand, a bit more optimistically, one can state, with some confidence, that a word like "Kalbi" (my dog) could have been pronounced in the Iron Age, and possibly earlier, exactly as the Masoretes heard it in their day. This, incidentally, is also how it is spoken in modern Hebrew. Uri Hurwitz Great Neck, NY --- On Tue, 11/16/10, K Randolph <[email protected]> wrote: Uri: Another question, how quickly did the pronunciation of Hebrew change during and after the Babylon Exile? Is not evidence from immigrant children as they speak their parents’ languages a clue? That clue indicates that a major change in pronunciation occurred in the first couple of generations after Hebrew ceased to be the primary language among those who speak it. That would explain the split between the sin and shin, for example, when evidence from the text is that they were one letter before the Exile. This clue indicates that that early change occurred long before any transliteration surviving from any language. Karl W. Randolph. On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 8:31 PM, Uri Hurwitz <[email protected]> wrote: Besides Greek evidence, one should also check the Arabic. Now, although in that case we are looking at written material which is many centuries later than the Greek, it nevertheless retains Semitic elements which are far earlier than both the Heb. or the LXX. Shlomo is known in Arabic is 'Suleiman'. The '-an' ending may be borrowed from the Greek, but may as well be an original pronounciation or spelling of the name. Comparewith the biblical name 'Naaman', for instance. As for the Heb. letter Shin, which becomes Sin in Arabic, that again may go back to early pronounciation, since unlike Greek, in Arabic like the Hebrew, both 'Shin' and 'Sin' exist. A further illustration is the biblical noun 'Shemesh' (sun); in Arabic it is 'Shams' -- compare the last consonant in the two languages. One may ask, what relevance does it have to the MT prononciation. However, a brief glance at the declensions of other biblical Segolate nouns like Melekh, such as Malki, etc. clearly shows that they maintained an earlier pronounciation which is preserved in the Arabic. The original question is valid; answers can be only tentative becuase of the complexities. To give just one example: to what extent does tha MT represent earlier pronounciations, and if it does, even partially as can be argued, from what periods? Uri Hurwitz Great Neck, NY _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
