Hi Isaac, First of all, thank you for bringing the subject back to Hebrew, since neither my reply nor the post I was responding to mentioned Hebrew, but were addressing more general linguistic matters.
On Sun, 24 Feb 2013 17:05:00 -0500, Isaac Fried <[email protected]> wrote: > Would not Hebrew be better since it needs barely a reconstruction? I don't see how. The question is, how far is it possible to reconstruct an assumed proto-language on the basis of modern, purely spoken descendents, and how far one can verify such a reconstruction. Hebrew of course is considered part of the Semitic family of languages, part of a larger Afro-Asiatic family. How would the computer reconstruction work here? Unlike the scenario of the article using the Austronesian languages, where one has a multitude of modern languages/dialects, but essentially no historical written evidence, the situation of the Semitic languages seems to me to be precisely the opposite. One has a dearth of Semitic languages that have survived to modern times. Of course, Arabic has been a huge success, dividing into a spectrum of modern spoken dialects unified by a common literary language (somewhat similar to the position of early Romance dialects vis-à-vis literary Latin in mediaeval times). I'm not sure about the situation of the African branch of the Semitic languages (i.e., the descendents of Ge`ez), but in the Asiatic branch, first Aramaic seems to have eclipsed other Semitic languages, including Hebrew and Akkadian, and then Arabic eclipsed Aramaic. Modern Hebrew is of course the "other" modern Asiatic-Semitic language, apart from Arabic, but because of its revivification, does not make itself an ideal candidate for historical comparison. (I understand that Aramaic still survives, but I suspect has been heavily Arabicized, and may be of marginal status). > On Feb 24, 2013, at 1:57 PM, Will Parsons wrote: > >> The good test case is that of the Romance languages > -- Will Parsons _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
