Dear Fred,
First of all, Fred Putnam has already posted several relevant answers to your questions. I'll add briefly: Part of the theoretical basis behind comparative linguistics is that all humans are ultimately descended from one original group of humans (this is consistent with both what the Bible says and with present anthropological and genetic theory). As these humans multiplied and spread over the earth, they split into different groups. Since, in the ancient world, geographic separation also means linguistic separation, as the different groups diverged, so did their languages, both by internal development and by being influenced by their different neighbors. This means, in theory, that the more similar languages are, the more recently their speakers diverged. Most of this process, of course, occurred over tens of thousands of years before we have written documents, but it can also be seen in recorded history, for example, in the development of Romance Languages from Latin. By "similar", linguists look for similarity in grammar, in basic lexemes (taking into account that words are borrowed across languages) and in phonology. In the Middle Ages, people were already making comparisons between Hebrew and Arabic and Aramaic. As the languages of the Ancient Near East were deciphered, it became clear that many of them share the same traits, and that even within the Semitic languages there are sub-groups, often classified as Eastern, Western (or Northwestern) and Southern. The Wiki article seems like a fairly good summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages. When "doing" comparative linguistics, one should always look for comparisons in languages that are as close as possible both geographically and chronologically. Thus, for example, the closest thing to Biblical Hebrew would be Moabite and Ammonite, but since we have so few inscriptions in those languages, they are of little use. So we go farther afield, to Aramaic, then Ugaritic, which is close geographically but less so chronologically, to Akkadian which is in a different branch of Semitic languages, to Arabic which is not only in a different branch, but is also only known in writing from much later. Greek, as a non-Semitic language, does not even come close. As I wrote before, the Septuagint can be used as a witness to the text and its interpretation, but not as a "cognate". Yigal Levin From: fred burlingame [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, November 25, 2010 12:10 AM To: Yigal Levin Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] cognate alphabet Hello Yigal: Thanks for your explanatory and clear comments. I am happy to accept the differences that you identify between ancient greek and biblical hebrew. But ..... then what confers on ugarit, arabic, hurrian, etc., the "blood relation" with biblical hebrew (missing from the greek)? And if the septuagint does form a basis for interpreting biblical hebrew language, why does academia today generally reject in english translations, all renderings of the greek septuagint that differ from the hebrew masoretic text? That's a fairly profound, implicit and unanimous pronouncement by the publishers and their academic consultants; to wit: the greek septuagint old testament inaccurate and the greek septuagint new testament accurate. I have no problem with the relevancy or irrelevancy of other languages to biblical hebrew. But it would be nice to know what other languages are generally accepted as relevant and as irrelevant to the interpretation of biblical hebrew. regards, fred burlingame _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
