The discovery that at least one modern South Arabian language still has
a lateralised sound as an allophone of sin might be taken as evidence
for the usefulness of the comparative method. If you start with one
sound rather than two, you do have to explain why not only Hebrew and
Aramaic developed sin for mostly the same words, but why both ancient
and modern South Arabian languages show a sin in over 80% of those same
words. It is rather odd that 3 languages who develop 3 's' sounds
distribute them in almost identical ways. Even if we accept Karl's
hypothesis that Hebrew borrowed sin from Aramaic, you still have to
explain why there is such a high degree of agreement between Aramaic and
South Arabian. Unless there is some strong connection between Aramaic
and Southern Arabia which we don't know about, borrowing would seem
unlikely.
Kevin Riley
On 18/11/2010 9:46 PM, Arnaud Fournet wrote:
From: "K Randolph" <[email protected]>
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.
Is this not a late development that postdates the Babylonian Exile? I
see
reasons to doubt the dual duty. The same with all the other dual duty
graphemes of the Masoretic tradition.
***
In all cases the language must have had lateralized phonemes,
just like the other North-Western Semitic languages did.
A.
***
What was the script that they were written in? Did Moses
translate them to the Hebrew of his day? Did he merely update the
language
to the Hebrew of his day? Did he need to do linguistic editing?
As for inventing their writing system, this was a time that when an
alphabet
was adopted from another language, that letters were freely dropped and
added to make the alphabet fit the new language. Look at how both
Latin and
Greek dropped and added letters.
As for Proto-Semitic, until ancient writing showing that language is
found,
is an artificial language based on theory. Is that theory accurate?
***
The comparative method has been "proved" by Anatolian PIE which has
the expected laryngeals.
Its validity has also been proved by Bloomfield who ultimately found
in other Algonkian languages the proto-phonemes he had hypothesized.
In general, I noticed that people who start rejecting the comparative
method have some absurd crap to sell.
This method is not just a great scientific achievement, more modestly
it's a very efficient crapbuster.
Arnaud Fournet
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