The Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions predate Moses by 1800 years. The fact
that Hebrew uses one grapheme for two sounds demonstrates that they
didn't create the alphabet (why make one sign do double duty when
you're creating the thing?): sin and shin use the same grapheme. In
fact, there may be others. Dalet for both daleth and dhalet if the
dhalet phoneme was still present in earlier Hebrew and others. There
were around 30 proto-Semitic phonemes and only 22 Hebrew graphemes.
How many survived into Hebrew is a matter of some debate and for how
long. It is most probable, most would say certain, that the Hebrews
did not invent their writing system. It is certainly true of the
script that is preserved in the Biblical mss which is the square
Aramaic script.
Donald R. Vance, Ph.D.
Professor of Biblical Languages and Literature
Oral Roberts University
[email protected]
[email protected]
On Nov 16, 2010, at 8:54 PM, K Randolph wrote:
Kevin:
On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 4:30 PM, Kevin Riley
<[email protected]>wrote:
Karl,
Something that has puzzled me for a while: what evidence do you
have that
Hebrew - or any other ancient language - had a one-to-one
correspondence
between letter and sound? Does not the evidence from most
languages point
the other way?
Kevin Riley
This comes down to another question: were the Hebrews the
originators or
adopters of their alphabet?
From historical records, assuming that the Bible is telling the
truth that
Moses wrote Torah, the Hebrews had the alphabet before the Phoenicians
adopted it from the Hebrews. Here I take again the pattern where all
other
examples that I know of where a person originates an alphabet for a
language, that he makes that alphabet have a one to one relationship
between
symbols and recognized phonemes. Therefore, since it appears that the
Hebrews originated their alphabet, they would have made it have a
one to one
correspondence between symbols and recognized consonantal phonemes.
Where a person adopts another alphabet for a previously unwritten
language,
then some letters will be used in combination for phonemes that the
alphabet
doesn’t natively represent, but even then in its original
formulation, there
is almost always (if not always) a one to one correlation between a
recognized phoneme and a letter or letter combination. Finnish is an
example
of this latter pattern.
So it comes down to whether or not the Hebrews originated their
alphabet. I
think the evidence indicates that they did.
Karl W. Randolph.
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