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.