Re: Steg's Hebrew Romanization

At 17:57 on 27.12.1998, vardi wrote:

> BP.Jonsson wrote:
> >
> > Steg, your ASCIIzations of Hebrew intrigues me.  Could you describe the
> > principles? E.g., I wonder if {hh} and {tt} are Heth and Teth (or is it Taw
> > -- as an Iranist I never remember the Semitic values right! :-0)
>
> I know what you mean, BP! As a fluent Hebrew speaker living in Israel
> for 12 years I'm always in awe of Steg's precise transliterations and
> try to approach them when I reply to comments he makes!
>
>         Shaul
For an Iranist the problem is that Middle Persian scribes normally not used
He and Teth at all in native Iranian words, and their use in the numerous
Aramaic words interspersed into the Pahlavi texts was allographic and
iconic rather than etymologic.  They didn't even exploit the possibility of
distinguishing /h/ from /x/ and /T/ from /s/ in Iranian words, but wrote
each of the pairs with only one letter.  Of all the Semitic "emphatics"
only one was consistently exploited to mark an Iranian phonemic contrast,
namely Cadik, which was always used for the Iranian /tS/ sound, and
sometimes for /dZ/ as well.

It appears that the Zoroastrian scholars of Sassanian times got fed up with
their underdistinctive orthography, since for writing down their Avestan
sacred texts they invented an alphabet that could express phonetic detail
far beyond the reqirements of phonological distinctions.  When, much later,
Zoroastrian scholars in India transcribed the difficult Pahlavi orthography
into the Avestan alphabet they instead got confused by having several
graphies to choose from for each Middle Persian sound.  Full swing of the
pendulum, thus.

/BP