David:

I pray that your son is well now, sorry to hear of his illness.

On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 2:05 PM, David Kolinsky <[email protected]>wrote:

> …
> Curious, what is the evidence that the Samekh was like an "X"?
>

The first evidences I noticed are that the Samekh is in the same place in
the alphabet in both Hebrew and Greek where the Xi has the “X” sound.
Secondly, both in archaic Hebrew and archaic Greek, the letter has the same
shape. Only later I noticed that the name Artaxerxes uses a Samekh for the
second “x” in Hebrew.

Admittedly, these are not proof, but suggestive.

The Greeks got their alphabet from the Phoenicians, and admitted to that.
The Phoenicians from the Hebrews, so I’m assuming that in the borrowing
that the phonemes stayed the same, at least at first.

>
> David Kolinsky
> Monterey, CA
>

Karl W. Randolph.
_______________________________________________
b-hebrew mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew

Reply via email to