venge of the Mutant Ninja Consonants (Re; mutation?

On Sun, 16 Aug 1998 16:01:22 -0400 Jay Bowks <jjbowks@...>
writes:
>Hey Dirk,
>what would you call the Ephraimite sound shift
>from "sh" to "s" in Shibboleth?
>Thintherely,
>Jay B.

I read in a book about the history of Hebrew that there's a theory that
the Efrayimite /s/ in [sibbolEt] wasn't an inability to pronounce the /S/
in standard (assumedly pre-begedkefet) /SibbolEt/, but an inability to
pronounce /T/ in the dialect of the Gil`ad's [TibbolEt].  Proto-Semitic
/T/ merged into /S/ in Hebrew.  This theory claims that the use of _shin_
in the transcription of [TibbolEt] is an orthographic choice due to the
similarity of the sounds, since there's no separate /T/ grapheme in
Hebrew.

However, i think the book rejected this theory on the basis that there's
no record of a Proto-Semitic root *ThBL that would account for a th-b-l /
sh-b-l discrepancy.


-Stephen (Steg)

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