David: On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 2:05 PM, David Kolinsky <[email protected]>wrote:
> > Karl, > I am not convinced that the Sin and the Shin were pronounced the same in > Biblical times. > I noticed that there are examples like $M “there, that place” coming from %YM “to place” and other words sometimes spelled with a sin, sometimes with a shin, but because this was never a research program I didn’t work up a list of these examples. > But there is reasonable evidence that the letter for Het was used for > two different sounds (Het and Chet) and that the letter for Ayin (Ayin and > Gayin) also (ex: Gamorra and Gaza). > I don’t see any evidence for these within Biblical Hebrew. Rather I suspect that these speculations come from post-Biblical Hebrew and/or cognate languages. > I believe that the Shin probably was for "Sh" and that when it was > pronounced Sin that that was very similar to a voiceless alveolar lateral > fricative. > I see no evidence that they were pronounced differently until during and after the Babylonian Exile, which would mean that Aramaic speaking Jews imported these distinctions from Aramaic. > > Curious, what is the evidence that the Samekh was like an "X"? > I noticed that in the name “Artaxerxes” that the second “X” is spelled with a Samekh in Ezra and Nehemiah. The first “X” is spelled with a softer gutteral, a Chet, followed by a Sin, which would have sounded like an “X” to Greek ears. Incidentally, Ezra spelled “Artaxerxes” with two Sins in Aramaic, suggesting that perhaps that Aramaic didn’t have a “X” phoneme at that time? And as Jews grew up speaking Aramaic without a “X” phoneme that they changed the Samekh to a Sin pronunciation. > > David Kolinsky > Monterey, CA > Karl W. Randolph.
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