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benelchi -> RE: "G-d" (6/26/2008 9:05:41 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DaveW
I am not a linguist. I had 2 housemates in college who were. (one is now a PHD in linguistics) I am passing on what they learned and told me.
In College, I studied Hebrew for 5 years (including one year of graduate studies). Over the years I have continued my studies, and still on occasion attend guest speaker lectures hosted by the Jewish studies program at Standford each year. I have no idea about who your house mates were, nor do I know anything about their field of expertise, but I do know the names of recognized experts in the field of Ancient Near Eastern linguistic studies who would disagree with their conclusions; I have even met a couple through the lecture series at Standford.
What I do know from experience; many scholarly works contain transliterations and those transliterations have a 1 to 1 relationship with the Hebrew letters so that the original can be accurately reconstructed from the transliteration. These transliterations include things like 'h' for 'hey', 'h' with a dot underneath for a 'het', forward and backward apostrophes for 'aleph' and 'ayin', and always 'w' for 'vav'. Where non technical transliterations often leave you guessing about what the spelling of the underlying text might have been, technical transliterations do not, but are often not intuitively pronounced by a native English speaker.
Also something I know from experience: Because there were no recording devices in ancient times, all ancient pronunciations are reconstructed by looking at transliterations of ancient words from one language into another (usually place or people names). These transliterations often exist in many of the languages of the surrounding cultures i.e. Greek, Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, etc... By comparing literature from the differing cultures at different time periods, changes in vocalization can be recognized by changes in the transliterations used.
Based on the information I have, all of the ancient Yemenite documents we have come from the period centuries after the Diaspora and so would have little value in the reconstruction of biblical Hebrew. Even if your friends were right, and we did have 2nd century documents to use for such a comparison, we would still have to realize that this is a comparison of a language a century after people speaking that language were uprooted from their homeland and fled in every possible direction to new countries and cultures because of the Roman persecution. Given the circumstances a change in dialect would be the expected norm, to remain unchanged through such chaotic cultural changes would be unique in History. As a comparison, look at the development of dialects in American English during the first 100 years i.e. the accents of "New York", "Chicago", "The deep south", etc..., and the complete loss of the "British" accent.
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