Question on the name Samuel from 1 Sam 1:20

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Jason Hare
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Re: Question on the name Samuel from 1 Sam 1:20

Post by Jason Hare »

For comparison of how the text looks in Paleo Hebrew and in the Masoretic Text.

Image

Once a student has gotten to a good reading level, vowels can certainly be removed. However, teaching a student who is unfamiliar with the language to read it without vowels and in a font like this does no one any favors.

If someone knows the language (they are familiar with its sounds and grammar), then they can read without vowels. I think it's impossible to go directly from nothing to reading Hebrew without vowels.
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kwrandolph
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Re: Question on the name Samuel from 1 Sam 1:20

Post by kwrandolph »

Jemoh66 wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 3:27 pm Karl,

What you are doing is rejecting the masoretic pointing wholesale, and in so doing you are turning a blind eye to the treasure of linguistic data.
What “treasure of linguistic data”?

To start out, the Masoretic points do NOT preserve Biblical era pronunciations. That alone should disqualify them.

Secondly, at times the Masoretic points indicate incorrect meanings, that the consonantal texts indicate different meanings than do the points.
Jemoh66 wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 3:27 pmHaving studied applied linguistics, What I see in the preserved Tiberian pronunciation is actual observable evidence of phonological change over time.
But of what time period do you speak? After all, DSS/late second temple Hebrew is ancient, yet it has been described to me as being significantly different from Biblical Hebrew.
Jemoh66 wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 3:27 pmThe Dagesh for me screams preservation of ancient Hebrew pronunciation as well as an even more ancient phonological development.
Absent late, post-Biblical Hebrew Dagesh, where’s your evidence?
Jemoh66 wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 3:27 pmBH speakers did not tolerate a nasal clustered with a following consonant and so we have as an example /bat/, daughter which has dropped the /n/ preserved in cognate languages /bint/. Even in modern Swahili daughter is still /binti/.
What makes you think that Hebrew ever had a nun in “daughter” as a singular noun? Where’s the evidence within Hebrew? Oh, that “daughter” has an irregular plural of “banate” where there’s still a vowel between the consonants is your evidence? If the evidence from the few transliterations dating from the Biblical era indicate a pattern, then the Biblical Hebrew “alphabet” started out as a syllabary, with each consonant followed by a vowel, making it that there never was a nasal clustered with a following consonant.

Just because a certain pattern appears in cognate languages, doesn’t mean that it ever was in Hebrew.
Jemoh66 wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 3:27 pmSo when a linguist sees a geminized /t/ in nathatti. Knowing the root contains III-nun, we can see that by the time the consonantal text was written, Hebrew has undergone the assimilation of the /n/ into the /t/ of the 1sr person subject agreement marker -/ti/, and through compensatory lengthening they geminized the /t/.
How soon was Hebrew originally written? If Moses merely edited but didn’t update the language of the earlier documents he inherited to write Genesis, then writing of Hebrew is antediluvian, before the Tower of Babel. That also indicates that Hebrew was unchanged at the Tower of Babel, all the other languages were changed.

Did they do compensatory lengthening, or is this a pattern that goes back to the origin of the language with no lengthening? And no geminizing? That any such geminizing is long post-Biblical?
Jemoh66 wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 3:27 pmThe masoretic pointing in this case is clearly preserving an early phonological phenomenon.
How early? Or did the Dagesh here merely preserve a pronunciation pattern of Tiberian Hebrew?
Jemoh66 wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 3:27 pmOn the other hand we can also see post biblical phonological changes like the /a/-/i/ vowel shift which seems to have occurred as late as 400 AD.
Examples: batyah —> bityah, magdal—> migdal
In case you haven’t noticed, my interest here is in Biblical Hebrew. Not DSS Hebrew. Not Mishnaic Hebrew. Not medieval/Tiberian Hebrew. Not modern Israeli Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew.

I see you imposing later concepts onto an earlier language where there’s no evidence within the earlier language for those concepts.

My conclusion is that the Masoretic points are not only unnecessary, but they can lead researchers astray when trying to study the consonantal text of the Bible that was written in Biblical Hebrew.

Karl W. Randolph.
kwrandolph
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Re: Question on the name Samuel from 1 Sam 1:20

Post by kwrandolph »

Jason Hare wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 5:46 pm
kwrandolph wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 2:54 pm [​C​]ould אביו have been pronounced something like “abayewu”? This is just a guess based on minimal information.
As anyone in their second week of Hebrew 101, and they will be able to tell you that אָבִיו is pronounced aviv without hesitation.
That’s not what I was taught in Hebrew 101. What you say is modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation, with no evidence that it was ever pronounced that way in Biblical Hebrew.
Jason Hare wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 6:39 pm I approach everything with an eye of "how can I teach this to a first-year student?" and "how can a first-year student acquire this feature of the language?"
By this you admit that you are basically an educator, not a linguistic researcher. There’s nothing wrong with that attitude.
Jason Hare wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 6:39 pmThere is no way to teach a student a language that lacks an authoritative pronunciation. It just doesn't work. Having no pronunciation and just reading symbols without vocalization is like not teaching a language at all. It's useless. From a pragmatic and pedagogic standpoint, your proposal is worthless. You must teach a pronunciation, and it is reasonable to use the pronunciation that THE WHOLE WORLD uses to communicate with one another.
Have you read what I wrote? Where I tell students that they must learn modern pronunciations in order to communicate with others? But at the same time to recognize that the pronunciation they are learning is not original, that the points sometimes indicate incorrect meanings, so that they need to follow the consonantal text first?
Jason Hare wrote: Wed Oct 14, 2020 10:06 pm Once a student has gotten to a good reading level, vowels can certainly be removed. However, teaching a student who is unfamiliar with the language to read it without vowels and in a font like this does no one any favors.

If someone knows the language (they are familiar with its sounds and grammar), then they can read without vowels. I think it's impossible to go directly from nothing to reading Hebrew without vowels.
Again you speak as an educator, not a researcher. You should be able to appreciate the conundrum of the post-Babylonian educator trying to teach Hebrew to Aramaic speaking youth, even before Ezra and Nehemiah. Within a few generations, even the educators were ignorant of original, Hebrew pronunciations and merely read the Hebrew letters with the Aramaic pronunciations that he spoke at home.

Karl W. Randolph.
Last edited by kwrandolph on Thu Oct 15, 2020 7:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Jason Hare
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Re: Question on the name Samuel from 1 Sam 1:20

Post by Jason Hare »

kwrandolph wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2020 7:21 am
Jason Hare wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 5:46 pm
kwrandolph wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 2:54 pm [​C​]ould אביו have been pronounced something like “abayewu”? This is just a guess based on minimal information.
As anyone in their second week of Hebrew 101, and they will be able to tell you that אָבִיו is pronounced aviv without hesitation.
That’s not what I was taught in Hebrew 101. What you say is modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation, with no evidence that it was ever pronounced that way in Biblical Hebrew.

Karl W. Randolph.
Your prof clearly started you out on the wrong foot. If they didn't even teach you that, then it's no wonder you're all confused about everything related to the language.
Jason Hare
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יוֹדֵ֣עַ צַ֭דִּיק נֶ֣פֶשׁ בְּהֶמְתּ֑וֹ וְֽרַחֲמֵ֥י רְ֝שָׁעִ֗ים אַכְזָרִֽי׃
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kwrandolph
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Re: Question on the name Samuel from 1 Sam 1:20

Post by kwrandolph »

Jason Hare wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2020 7:28 am
kwrandolph wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2020 7:21 am
Jason Hare wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 5:46 pm

As anyone in their second week of Hebrew 101, and they will be able to tell you that אָבִיו is pronounced aviv without hesitation.
That’s not what I was taught in Hebrew 101. What you say is modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation, with no evidence that it was ever pronounced that way in Biblical Hebrew.

Karl W. Randolph.
Your prof clearly started you out on the wrong foot. If they didn't even teach you that, then it's no wonder you're all confused about everything related to the language.
Nope. The professor taught what was then understood as the Yeminite pronunciation of Hebrew, where the ו was understood always to have the pronunciation of “W” and not “V” as inherited from Yiddish.

Yes, he started me off on the wrong foot, using the textbook written by Weingreen and the dictionary by Gesenius. But he couldn’t help it, because that was the era when questioning Tiberian Hebrew among language researchers was just starting.

Karl W. Randolph.
ducky
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Re: Question on the name Samuel from 1 Sam 1:20

Post by ducky »

The sound of ו=V is also very old (Yiddish didn't created that).
But the original sound was W (and it is not just in the Yemenite accent).
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Re: Question on the name Samuel from 1 Sam 1:20

Post by Jason Hare »

ducky wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2020 11:48 am The sound of ו=V is also very old (Yiddish didn't created that).
But the original sound was W (and it is not just in the Yemenite accent).
Absolutely. It has been v at least since the earliest part of the Second Temple Period.
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kwrandolph
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Re: Question on the name Samuel from 1 Sam 1:20

Post by kwrandolph »

Jason Hare wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2020 11:56 am
ducky wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2020 11:48 am The sound of ו=V is also very old (Yiddish didn't created that).
But the original sound was W (and it is not just in the Yemenite accent).
Absolutely. It has been v at least since the earliest part of the Second Temple Period.
Where’s your evidence for your pronunciation?

Karl W. Randolph.
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Re: Question on the name Samuel from 1 Sam 1:20

Post by Jason Hare »

kwrandolph wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2020 1:58 pm
Jason Hare wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2020 11:56 am
ducky wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2020 11:48 am The sound of ו=V is also very old (Yiddish didn't created that).
But the original sound was W (and it is not just in the Yemenite accent).
Absolutely. It has been v at least since the earliest part of the Second Temple Period.
Where’s your evidence for your pronunciation?

Karl W. Randolph.
Haven't we been over this already? Do you not remember the appearance of גב and גו in the late literature?
Jason Hare
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ducky
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Re: Question on the name Samuel from 1 Sam 1:20

Post by ducky »

Hi Jason,

I think that גב and גו is not a good exmaple to bring.
גב/גו/גוף are all from the same base.

just like we won't say about סכר and סגר that the G was pronounced as K, or the K was pronounced as G.

**

In the handscripts of the Mishna there are mix between the ו and the ב in clear cases.
For example,
אבזים/אוזים=avazim (here the ו was written as ב)
יונה/יבנה=yavne (here the ב was written as ו)
there are more examples, but I picked only two.

Also, in old Hebrew/grammar books from the medivial era, it is said that in Israel there is a pronunciation of the ו as V.

for example, The Karaite Abu al-Faraj Harun wrote a book about the right reading of the bible, and he wrote that in Israel there is a pronunciation of the letter ו, when it comes at the end of a word, it is like V.

in three other books:
1. by the karaite David ben Abraham al-Fasi
2. by anonimous writer
3. by Mishael ben Uziel

It is understood, that also ו that starts the word or in its mddle, was pronounced as V.

****
So clearly this ו as V is not something new, and it goes back to the mishnaic times.
And surely it doesn't mean that everyone pronounced it like that, but it shows about a known pronounciation of that letter by some speakers and reader.
David Hunter
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