Hello all, I was asked a question by a friend about the origin of the sofit letters. I looked in Gesenius and he seems to be silent about the matter. I'm a high school Latin teacher, with no expertise in Hebrew, so I thought I'd check here for verification of my off-the-cuff guess:
1. This is a question of the development of the Aramaic alphabet, since the Paleo-Hebrew script does not make a distinction in terminal letters (as far as I can tell by glancing at the chart in Gesenius at least!). 2. The sofit letters seem to be the ones to come directly from the old script (so the non-terminal versions must have developed later). 3. My guess is that the distinctions developed for either or both of the following reasons: to make writing quicker and simpler (like the development of minuscule lettering with the Roman alphabet), or to distinguish between orthographically similar letters (*something* like the development of j, to distinguish between the consonant and the vowel). Does this sound about right? Thanks in advance, Berel Beyer -- Al titen lamuglegim ledake otcha! ~ Ron Weasley _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
