Uri: On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 7:00 AM, Uri Hurwitz <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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. > The historical record indicates otherwise. While it agrees that the Babylonians did not exile the whole population, it records that those who remained self-exiled themselves to Egypt, and if anyone did not willingly self-exile with the group, he was compelled to accompany the group. The end result is that the total population was exiled, not one left on the land. > > 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. > That depends. How much did Aramaic diverge from Hebrew? We know the two languages were mutually incomprehensible prior to the Babylonian Exile. Beyond that, both Daniel and Ezra were written with the expectation that their audience knew Aramaic. So how much change did Aramaic induce into Hebrew? > > Clear written evidence of separate letters for separate > sibilants exists in Ugaritic, a close relative of Hebrew. > Just because they existed in Ugaritic, does that mean they existed in Hebrew? The answer is: we don’t know. But indications from the Hebrew alphabet as it was used in the language are that they did not. > > 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. > The question is not did that differentiation exist, but did Hebrew have them? The evidence from within the Hebrew language is that Hebrew did not have them until post-Babylonian Exile. > > We simply don't have enough evidence for fully > reconstructing the development of the pronounciation > in the periods that interest you. > I agree. > > Look at the similar case of ancient Egyptian. > Despite vast amount of written material which exists > for that language, pronounciation is often > uncertain. > That’s only one of their problems, do not many more exist as well? > > 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. > Modern Hebrew copies the Masoretes as an artificially resurrected language, which accounts for that similarity in pronunciation. But what clues did the Masoretes have, if not only the pronunciation tradition that existed in their time and place? > > Uri Hurwitz Great Neck, NY > > I know that some of my questions are unanswerable with the knowledge that we have, but I ask them anyways because they show the uncertainty of what we know. Is it not more honest to admit that there is much that we still don’t know about the language? Karl W. Randolph. _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
