Re: Semitic rhotic questions

On Friday, November 7, 2003, at 05:23  PM, Muke Tever wrote:
> On Fri, 7 Nov 2003 09:33:49 -0500, Paul Bennett
> <paul-bennett@...>
> wrote:
>> On Thu, 06 Nov 2003 18:36:10 +0200, Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...>
>> wrote:
>>>> 1. Does anyone know with any acceptable degree of
>>>> certainty what the actual value of the Biblical Hebrew
>>>> rhotic was?
>>>
>>> It is rather possible that Old Hebrew /r/ was [G] or [R] because it
>>> is
>>> classified as guttural, and its presence in the stem provokes the
>>> same
>>> kind of phonetic changes, as, e.g. /X\/ or /?\/.
> [snip]
>> Anyone else got any information to back up either /4/ or /G/~/R/ for
>> ancient Hebrew? Steg? Dan? Anyone?
>
> Etymologically speaking... _Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic_ describes
> the sound *r as a flap [4], and remaining *r in most of the family
> (except
> Egyptian, where it goes to [n], [?], and [j] depending on environment)
>
> [Of course there's nothing to say it didnt change _since_ then, as I
> gather something hideous happened to the original PS *G in Hebrew from
> PAA
> *G and *G_w...]
>        *Muke!
Naaaa, nothing very hideous.  It just merged into /3/ (`ayin), making
room for the development of [G] as an allophone of /g/.


-Stephen (Steg)
  "mimmeghedh"