On 02/15/11 08:13, Berel Beyer wrote: > 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).
My guess is that they were developed for manuscripts where the words had no or very little space between them, and there would be ambiguity about which word a letter belonged to. The sofit letters would make the word division unambiguous. Of course, it would be an interpretation of the scribe at some point; this could be useful in textual criticism of the text as one tries to reconstruct how a textual variant came about. Blessings, Kirk -- Kirk E. Lowery, PhD, President & Senior Research Fellow The J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research http://www.GrovesCenter.org -- The tricorder broke Communicator is dead And my shirt is red --Star Trek haiku _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
