Reddit reviews A Grammar for Biblical Hebrew (Revised Edition)

> There's evidence from lots.....

There's some limited evidence in some random communities, but no semetic language, again to my knowledge, use the letter consistently. My point is that at least as far back as the first temple, Samakh and Sin were pronounced the same. There's also some theological significance to this as in Sefer Yetzirah, Shin is not counted among the double letters. This is because the other sound was found in Sin. The 7th double letter was Resh which is either a trill or a flap depending on a condition I haven't yet figured out. I'm beginning to think it has to do with cantillation and grammar rather than word form.

> But how could you read the Samaritans as meaning anything other than things being different in the past? They clearly can say the s sound in sin, but pronounced samekh without it (amusingly, I think the Shibolet story wouldn't quite work with Samaritans, since שבולת and סבולת would be the same).

Because of Kuthic influence. It's not that they couldn't pronounce the samakh, it's that they pronounced it differently. They had a ɬ sound and needed a letter for it. They had the s sound and needed a different letter for it. It seems that for a short period of time, Shin did the same double duty until they lost the ʃ sound leaving the shin being simply s, and the samakh being the ɬ. Which, I've seen in some modern videos, they are pretty much now entirely the same making shin and samakh basically the same letter. But that happened due to arabic influence.

> If you've got a chart of how the vowel symbols compare to the IPA vowel symbols, could you show me it?

I don't, but I'll just write it out real quick. These long and short defiantly exist because they effect the pronunciation voiced shwas and the doubling of beged kefet letters. Ashkenazim tend to omit voiced shewas (compare sphardi with sephardi, and brukha with berukha), but if you read psalms where the number of syllables is known, you'll see this checks out.

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Petah - Short a (a)

Qamatz - Long a (ɔ) it may possibly be (ɑ)

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Segol - Short e (ɛ)

Tzere - Long e (e)

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Hiriq - Short i (ɪ)

Hiriq - Long i (i) when stressed, with metag, or with mater

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Qamatz Katan - Short o (o) may possibly be (ɔ) this may resolve the conflict with qamatz

Holam - Long o (o) may possibly be (ø) but I find it unlikely and it may just be a regional dialect. it also breaks some of the predictions the vowel/mater match up makes

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Kubutz - Short u (ʊ) may also be a long u based on the same rules as hiriq when spelled defective

Shurek - Long u (u)

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> As an aside, do you daven using reconstructed pronunciation?

I do, but nobody as really noticed. I keep it quiet enough to myself that people either haven't noticed or haven't said anything. In the rare event I'm reading in front of people, I use the pronunciation that they are accustomed to so as not to stand out. If I'm at a conservative shul, I use modern. If I'm at an Ashkenazi shul I use Ashkenazi with the exception of the holam because toyrah just makes me giggle.

> segol and what's a tzere without looking at the symbols since there isn't a phonetic system to figure out which is which since they aren't allophonic.

It's actually pretty easy to figure out. Once you learn the difference between long vowels and short vowels, and learn the stress rules, hebrew starts to make much more sense. There's definitely a system and you'll see weird anomalies start to come together. Seow's biblical hebrew grammar, while it teaches modern pronunciation in passing, does distinguish between short and long vowels in transliteration, and teaches all the rules for distinguishing short and long vowels, adjusting for stress, and so on and so forth.

I don't have any sources on Greek, but during my undergrad in religious studies with a focus on OT and ANE texts, my mentor had me studying through Seow's A Grammar for Biblical Hebrew. It presupposes a lot of linguistic knowledge on the reader's part, but nothing that's indigestible. Good exercises at the end of chapters, but I'd you've never studied a language before, it may take some heavy chewing to digest. Definitely a good resource nonetheless.