On Wed, 5 Dec 2012 09:00:48 -0800, K Randolph <[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.
As far as the position of xi in the alphabet corresponding to samekh, I think that *is* suggestive, but doesn't necessarily point to Hebrew (or really Phoenician) samekh having a [ks] phoneme. More likely, the Greek sibilant phoneme(s) didn't match completely with the various Phoenician sibilants, and the Phoenician samekh struck the Greek ear as something whose nearest equivalent was like Greek /ks/. (And apparently Phoenician shin/sin was the best fit for Greek /s/.) "Artaxerxes" is interesting, but it seems to me it has to be considered in conjunction with the even more famous Persian king named "Xerxes". It's hard to look at these two Greek forms without thinking that "Artaxerxes" is an expanded form of "Xerxes", but the Persian forms they're based on, "Artakhshaça" and "Khshayarsha", are not so strikingly similar. Of course the khsh (i.e., [xʃ]) sequence would be represented in Greek by xi, but it's interesting to note that the second [ʃ] in "Khshayarsha" was also represented by Greek xi. I'm not sure what a "good" Greek rendering of "Artakhshaça" would be, but I can't help but think the actual form "Artaxerxes" has been assimilated in form somewhat to the more famous "Xerxes". > 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. I don't think that's a good assumption. I think it's safe to assume that when the Greeks got their alphabet from the Phoenicians, they used the Phoenician letters with values nearest to their own, but having quite different phonologies, the correspondence between the sounds in the two languages could be quite approximate. (And of course, the Greeks were quite creative in re-defining some Phoenician guttural consonant letters as vowels.) Apart from what I've written above, I see as a more fundamental problem with a consonant cluster like [ks] acting as a single phoneme (and hence being represented by a single letter) in Hebrew (or other Semitic languages). If samekh *did* represent a cluster, then I would expect to see at least some instances where samekh was used in words where /k/ and /s/ as separate sounds happened to fall together, i.e., a parallel to Greek νυξ/nyx vs νυκτες/nyktes. -- Will Parsons μη φαινεσθαι, αλλ' ειναι. _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
