# Proto-Semitic s1, s2 & s3



## Abu Rashid

I am having some trouble understanding the relationship between these three letters, which seem to get a little jumbled between the various Semitic languages.

Here is what I understand, and if I'm wrong, please correct me:

Hebrew "shin" seems to be etymologically equated with Arabic "sin" in that words with the "sin" radical in Arabic will usually have the "shin" radical in Hebrew. Sometimes however in words like "Israel" the "shin" letter becomes "sin" (by positioning a dot over one of the 'teeth' of the letter), which seems to be etymologically equated to Arabic's "shin" in most cases. These letters also look the same, having three teeth pointing upwards.

According to "Ancient languages of Syria-Palestine and Northern Arabia", when the Hebrews adopted the Phoenician alphabet, it did not contain enough letters for all of their letters, and so that's how sin/shin converged.

Then there is samek(h), which I don't understand at all. It's sound today in Hebrew seems to be the same as "sin" in Arabic, and even words like "salam" I've seen translated into Hebrew as "samek, lam, alef, meem". Was it different in the past? Because it would seem to just be the same as "sin".

Any light shed on the confusion I seem to having here would be good.


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## berndf

There are two different questions intertwined which might be the cause of your confusion:

1. The letters Samekh, Shin and Sin:
In Phoenician/Hebrew/Aramaic script Samekh and Shin/Sin are two (not three) different letters. In Hebrew writing with diacritic marks, Shin and Sin are disambiguated by a dot on the right above (Shin) and left above (Sin) the letter. The Arabic Sin and Shin are both derived from the Aramaic letter Shin/Sin. Arabic has no letter derived from Samekh.

2. Development of sounds
In Proto-Semitic, there were certainly three different sounds. The traditional assumption is that Samekh was [s], Shin [ʃ] and Sin [ɬ]. If I remember correctly, others reconstruct the origin of Samekh as [ts], Shin [s] and Sin [tɬ]. But the only thing that matters is that the three were originally different. In Hebrew the sounds of Shamekh and Sin merged to [s] while Shin remained/became [ʃ]. In other Canaanite languages Shin and Sin merged which explains that there is only one letter for both while Samekh remained separate.
In Arabic Sin became [ʃ] while Samekh and Shin merged to [s]. Some ancient Hebrew dialects must have shown the Samekh/Shin merger as well (see here).


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## origumi

Add to the list the Hebrew letter "tzadi" which exists in Arabic but its Arabic pronounciation sounds like "sin" to the Hebrew ear.

This is a problem for people called Tzartzur, a common Arabic name: "sarsur" in Hebrew means "pimp".


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## berndf

origumi said:


> Add to the list the Hebrew letter "tzadi" which exists in Arabic but its Arabic pronounciation sounds like "sin" to the Hebrew ear.


But only to a modern Hebrew ear. The classical pronunciation was most likely [sˤ] (emphatic s) like in Arabic. Proto-Semitic also had [ɬˤ] (emphatic Sin, still present in South Arabian) which in Hebrew and other Canaanite languages merged with Tsade while it remained separate in Arabic, becoming the emphatic "d" (Ḍad, ﺽ).

EDIT: The table here gives a good overview of the development of unvoiced Proto-Semitic sibilants. (I am not sure why they write צ and ץ for ṣ and ṣ´, respectively. In Hebrew they are just graphical variants of the same letter: צ=non final, ץ=final.)


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## Abu Rashid

origumi said:


> This is a problem for people called Tzartzur, a common Arabic name: "sarsur" in Hebrew means "pimp".


 
As far as I'm aware nobody would call himself this in Arabic because it means cockroach 

If you mean صرصور (sarsoor) that is.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> As far as I'm aware nobody would call himself this in Arabic because it means cockroach


The ambiguity is to a modern Hebrew, not to an Arabic ear. Most modern Hebrew speakers ignore the difference between emphatic and non-emphatic variants of a consonant (like Kaph and Qoph).


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## origumi

Abu Rashid said:


> As far as I'm aware nobody would call himself this in Arabic because it means cockroach
> 
> If you mean صرصور (sarsoor) that is.


Yes. Wikipedia about the Arab Israeli MP Sheikh Ibrahim Sarsoor/Tzartzoor:


> שייח' אבראהים צרצור (ערבית: إبراهيم صرصور, נהגה: איבראהים סרסור), חבר הכנסת מטעם סיעת רע"ם-תע"ל.


 
http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%90%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%94%D7%99%D7%9D_%D7%A6%D7%A8%D7%A6%D7%95%D7%A8

He insists to be called Tzartzoor and not Sarsoor in Hebrew, apparently for the reason mentioned above. In Hebrew it [almost] means cricket, not cockroach (cricket = tzartzar).


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## Abu Rashid

berndf,



> There are two different  questions intertwined which might be the cause of your confusion:




I don't think this is the cause of my confusion, but it could well be. I recognise there's obviously a difference between the sounds, which probably existed in most languages independant of any orthography that later developed, and the alphabets which were later used to record and represent those sounds.




> In Hebrew writing with  diacritic marks, Shin and Sin are disambiguated by a dot on the right  above (Shin) and left above (Sin) the letter.




Does "sin" appear often in Hebrew? It doesn't seem so from the exposure I've had to Hebrew so far, which admittedly isn't a lot. I can only think of a few words in which it exists, like Israel and the word for ten, which in Arabic uses "shin". Also something else I thought of is that the Arabic letter "tha" is also mixed in with "shin" in Hebrew as well, so that further adds to the confusion.




> In Proto-Semitic, there were  certainly three different sounds.




Why do you say that? Could it be that they were actually "sin", "shin" and "tha"?? I wonder if "tha" is etymologically equated with "samek" in any cases.




> The traditional assumption is  that Samekh was [s], Shin [ʃ] and Sin [ɬ]




I'm not quite sure exactly what those sounds equate to. Since I don't really understand the system you're using there (IPA i think?). I know the middle one is a "sh" sound, but that's about it. Is the [s] the same as English "s"? and what is the last one like?




> others reconstruct the origin  of Samekh as [ts]




Isn't there already a letter in Hebrew (tsade) with that sound??




> In Arabic Sin became [ʃ] while Samekh and Shin merged to  [s].




So Arabic has reversed the "sin" and "shin" sounds from the original Semitic sounds?


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Why do you say that? Could it be that they were actually "sin", "shin" and "tha"?? I wonder if "tha" is etymologically equated with "samek" in any cases.


No. As you wrote before, "th" merged with Shin in Canaanite languages, e.g. Arabic thalatha=Hebrew shalosh.



Abu Rashid said:


> I'm not quite sure exactly what those sounds equate to.


[ɬ] is like the Welsh double "L", something like a "sh" with a lateral release which makes it sound like a mixure of "sh" and "l". Search for the keyword "ɬ" in Wikipedia, there are samples. The Arabic Ḍad, ﺽ, which was originally an emphatic [ɬ] still has a lateral plosive release which sort of shows its origin.





Abu Rashid said:


> Since I don't really understand the system you're using there (IPA i think?). I know the middle one is a "sh" sound, but that's about it. Is the [s] the same as English "s"?


That's correct. But [s] only represents the unvoiced "s" like in English "sun". The voiced "s" as in English "rose" is [z] in IPA.



Abu Rashid said:


> Isn't there already a letter in Hebrew (tsade) with that sound??


That's modern Hebrew. I am not quite sure where it comes from but probably from Yiddish. The German "z", pronounced [ts], is perceived as a "heavy s". This might be the origin.

And, as I wrote, this is only one of the reconstructions of the Proto-Semitic sound.



Abu Rashid said:


> So Arabic has reversed the "sin" and "shin" sounds from the original Semitic sounds?


Probably rather Sin [ɬ] was simplified to [ʃ] producing the Arabic Shin. Samehk, however it was realized, merged with Shin, however it was realized, producing the Arabic Sin [s].

Concerning the Hebrew Shin/Arabic Sin: It is unclear which one is the original and which one changed. The Proto-Semitic sound is usually transcribed "š" which suggests the pronunciation [ʃ]; but this was just the assumption of the 19th century scholars who created the system. It doesn't have to be like this.

This table is a good synopsis of the various Semitic consonant-shifts. The Symbols used for the Proto-Semitic sounds are usally a fair indication how these sound were probably pronounced but strictly speaking they are just names for unknown sounds.


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## Aoyama

This discussion is a bit difficult to follow for me (ignorant as I am). But just to put my modest grain of salt : the difference between Shin and Sin in (Biblical) Hebrew must have been there already if you refer to the story about Shiboleth and Siboleth ...
Another example is the mention of "Shin" in the Bible (also read as "Sin") and [wrongly] supposed to have meant China (from Qin/Ch'in) in "the land of Sinim (Isaiah,49:12)", probably a region close to modern Assuan (in Egypt).


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## berndf

Aoyama said:


> the difference between Shin and Sin in (Biblical) Hebrew must have been there already if you refer to the story about Shiboleth and Siboleth ...


Yes, I mentioned this in #2 above (last sentence). From the Bible passage it is actually unclear whether only Samekh and Shin merged in this dialect or also Sin. In early Canaanite dialects different mergers seemed to have occured.


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## Aoyama

> From the Bible passage it is actually unclear whether only Samekh and Shin merged in this dialect or also Sin.


(didn't see the here site)
Is it really the Samekh merging into Sin ? Graphically Samekh and Sin/Shin are very different. I was once told that *Tet* and *Samekh *had a link. This is why Tet is used to transcribe Greek Theta (sorry, can't write neither Greek nor Hebrew here).


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## berndf

Aoyama said:


> Is it really the Samekh merging into Sin ? Graphically Samekh and Sin/Shin are very different.


The bible quotation suggests that Samekh and Shin (not Sin) merged phonetically in Ephraimite dialect. Spelling is an entirely different matter. The alphabet wasn't designed for Hebrew but for different Canaanite (Phoenician) dialects where Shin and Sin must have been merged.





Aoyama said:


> I was once told that *Tet* and *Samekh *had a link. This is why Tet is used to transcribe Greek Theta (sorry, can't write neither Greek nor Hebrew here).


I am not aware of such a link. But this might well be my ignorance.


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## Aoyama

> The bible quotation suggests that Samekh and Shin (not Sin) merged phonetically in Ephraimite dialect. Spelling is an entirely different matter. The alphabet wasn't designed for Hebrew but for different Canaanite (Phoenician) dialects where Shin and Sin must have been merged.


What I meant was that Shin and Sin are the same letters (with a dot added) , whereas Samekh is graphically (in its Hebrew version) completely different.
But then, the difference may not be so marked in the original Phenician version.


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## berndf

Aoyama said:


> What I meant was that Shin and Sin are the same letters (with a dot added) , whereas Samekh is graphically (in its Hebrew version) completely different.
> But then, the difference may not be so marked in the original Phenician version.


Excactly what I meant. There must have been...





berndf said:


> ...Canaanite (Phoenician) dialects where Shin and Sin must have been merged.


Where "merged" means "pronounced the same way". This is the most plausible assumption why Shin and Sin are the same letter in the Phoenician alphabet.


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## Abu Rashid

> Where "merged" means "pronounced the same way". This is the most  plausible assumption why Shin and Sin are the same letter in the  Phoenician alphabet.


So in most Canaanite dialects, these letters were not actually distinguished between at all is what you're suggesting there?

Only Hebrew (that we know of) distinguished between them, but Hebrew was using an alphabet which didn't have separate characters for them?

Since these northern Semitic languages all seem to have some confusion regarding sin/shin I'm guessing then this must've been where the letters became swapped. Since all the southern Semitic languages seem to be the reverse, and they all distinguish properly both in writing and speech between sin/shin, meaning there's much less chance they could've easily have become reversed over time.

Does anyone know the situation of Akkadian regarding sin/shin? Does it agree with the northern or southern languages? And does it distinguish properly in writing between the two?


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## clevermizo

Abu Rashid said:


> Since all the southern Semitic languages seem to be the reverse, and *they all distinguish properly both in writing* and speech between sin/shin, meaning there's much less chance they could've easily have become reversed over time.



They only do now. In antiquity Arabic was written without any dots at all, so ب ت ث all appeared the same, and so did س، ش. The system of dots doesn't appear consistently until the 7th century. Besides, the Arabic alphabet is still ultimately descended from the North Semitic alphabet(s). The _samekh_ just didn't give rise to any Arabic letter, but it was still used in Nabataean which is the alphabet from which Arabic was formed.

In Akkadian, Hebrew _sin _and _shin_ are both _sh_ in cognates, so since it is just one sound there's no reason to distinguish (I suppose this is the same as what happened in Phoenician). _S__amekh_ is _s_ in cognates. I assume these are distinguished in cuneiform, but I don't know enough about cuneiform.

I also don't know what you mean by all the southern Semitic languages. What's the situation in Amharic, Ge'ez, Tigrinya, Modern South Arabian and Old South Arabian?


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## Aoyama

With all this, it is still difficult for me to see (or understand) a graphical link between shin/sin and samekh.
Especially when you take into accounts a few facts like these :
.shin is a special letter (cf.shaddai), that appears on the mezuzah, pendants etc and is related to G.od
. samekh may come from a graphic (hieroglyphic) representation of a fish (samak in Arabic), different from shin (a three teeth fork)


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## berndf

Aoyama said:


> With all this, it is still difficult for me to see (or understand) a graphical link between shin/sin and samekh.


Why would you assume there should be a link or do I misunderstand you?


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## Abu Rashid

> They only do now. In antiquity Arabic was written without any dots at  all, so ب ت ث all appeared the same, and so did س، ش.



True but obviously they were all preserved quite well. I think Arabic speakers tend to pride themselves on their very distinct ability to distinguish between different sounds, which may even sound similar to outsiders. And have made sure they preserved them quite well.

I just can't imagine the two letters becoming completely reversed like that, so the only situation I can envisage here is of some languages losing the distinction between the two, and then regaining it, and they became mixed up in the process.


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## Aoyama

> Why would you assume there should be a link or do I misunderstand you?


I don't/cannot assume there is a link between shin/sin _and_ samekh.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> So in most Canaanite dialects, these letters were not actually distinguished between at all is what you're suggesting there?


I didn't imply any numbers. I only said that in Central Semitic languages any two way merger of the original three non-emphatic unvoiced sibilants must have occured: Samehk-Shin (e.g. Arabic and some Hebrew dialects), Samekh-Sin (other Hebrew dialects including modern Hebrew), Shin-Sin (suggested by the fact that there is only one letter for both; maybe under Akkadian influence?).



Abu Rashid said:


> Since these northern Semitic languages all seem to have some confusion regarding sin/shin I'm guessing then this must've been where the letters became swapped.


Those were different sound shifts, not confusions.



Abu Rashid said:


> Since all the southern Semitic languages seem to be the reverse, and they all distinguish properly both in writing and speech between sin/shin,


I don't understand what you mean. Modern South Arabian realizes Samehk and Shin like Hebrew and not like Arabic and it still has /ɬ/ for Sin, i.e. it distinguishes all three sounds and not just two like Hebrew or Arabic.



Abu Rashid said:


> Does anyone know the situation of Akkadian regarding sin/shin? Does it agree with the northern or southern languages? And does it distinguish properly in writing between the two?


As clevermizo wrote, Shin-Sin are not distinguished but Samekh is distinct from Shin-Sin. This is the same situation as we find in the Phoenician alphabet.


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## berndf

Aoyama said:


> I don't/cannot assume there is a link between shin/sin _and_ samekh.


Then why did you write "With all this, it is still difficult for me to see (or understand) a graphical *link* between shin/sin and samekh.", if you don't think there is or should be a link? I am not trying to be clever here. I am just trying to understand what your wanted to say.


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## Aoyama

The whole discussion here (if I follow this well) is about a link between shin/sin (one letter) and samekh (another letter).
Given the reasons I have tried to expose, amongst which :
. graphic differences between shin/sin and samekh
. shin/sin having a special religious significance in Judaism (not the case with samekh)
it is therefore difficult for me to imagine that both letters have the link described here.


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## berndf

Aoyama said:


> The whole discussion here (if I follow this well) is about a link between shin/sin (one letter) and samekh (another letter).


I see what you mean. It is not a question of creating two spellings for the same sound. All scholars agree that Samekh, Shin and Sin were originally three different sounds. Just, two of the three became over time pronounced the same. We have to assume that the /s/ in *ס*פר and *ש*ר were once pronounced differently. There are analogies in other languages. In English /f/ in _enough_ is spelled <gh> and not <f> as in _fish_. This is so because the spelling of _enough_ corresponds to an older pronunciation ([eˈnoʊχ] rather than [ɪˈnʌf]) and the sound originally represented by <gh> disappeared in Modern English. In Hebrew the original sound of Sin (like a Welsh <ll>) disappeared and became pronounced the same way as Samekh.


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## Abu Rashid

> In Hebrew the original sound of  Sin (like a Welsh <ll>) disappeared  and became pronounced the same way as Samekh.




Couldn't it be possible that Samekh was originally Sin, and had the same pronunciation of 's' that it has today, but that in Phoenician and Hebrew for instance it became confused with Shin, whilst in Arabic it became a new letter Sin, which might appear like Shin, but doesn't necessarily have to do "descended" from it?

Are there for instance cognates which have Sin in Arabic, yet Samekh in Hebrew?

From what you've stated above, it would seem even the name "Israel" itself was not originally Israel but Illrael??

It seems to me that you're creating a whole other pronunciation for Sin, which doesn't seem to exist in any Semitic language (does it??) just to explain why Samekh and Sin are graphically different.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> From what you've stated above, it would seem even the name "Israel" itself was not originally Israel but Illrael??


N.B.: Like the Welsh <ll>, not like the English <ll>.


Abu Rashid said:


> It seems to me that you're creating a whole other pronunciation for Sin, which doesn't seem to exist in any Semitic language (does it??) just to explain why Samekh and Sin are graphically different.


As I wrote earlier, it still exists in Modern South Arabian which is understood to be the phonetically most conservative living Semitic language.

See here for a summary of the development in different Semitic languages.


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## Aoyama

Thank you for taking the trouble (so patiently) to give me such a thorough explanation.
But given the fact that we are talking  (to speak simply) about the sound *s *(I guess* sh *is excluded here), I don't see what other way to pronounce *s *there can be, even if some languages (like Chinese) do possess different sounds close (or derived) from *s*.
I would tend to follow (with all due respect) here Abou Rashid :


> It seems to me that you're creating a whole other pronunciation for Sin, which doesn't seem to exist in any Semitic language (does it??) just to explain why Samekh and Sin are graphically different.


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## berndf

Aoyama said:


> But given the fact that we are talking (to speak simply) about the sound *s *(I guess* sh *is excluded here), I don't see what other way to pronounce *s *there can be, even if some languages (like Chinese) do possess different sounds close (or derived) from *s*.


As I wrote before, the [ɬ] still exists in some Semitic languages and its simplification to [ʃ] as in Arabic and Phoenician is a very obvious development. In Hebrew the sound went in a different direction.

This is a very well researched field in Semiticism and it is certainly not an Ad-Hoc assumption to explain a pecularity in Hebrew spelling. The reconstruction of Sin as [ɬ] was mainly driven from the analysis of Southern Semitic languages. And I am not aware of any scholar who contradicted this reconstruction ([ɬ] or possibly [tɬ]).


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## Abu Rashid

> N.B.: Like the Welsh <ll>, not like the English <ll>.



Yes I had a listen to it from the link you posted earlier.



> As I wrote earlier, it still exists in Modern South Arabian



The link you provided says only in two dialects of MSA, granted they are the two largest dialects (if I recall correctly).



> which is understood to be the phonetically most conservative living  Semitic language.



Is it the MSA languages or the OSA languages which are supposed to be the most phonologically conservative? I always thought it was the OSA languages.



> See here for a summary of the development in different  Semitic languages.



As they say _"The sound is conjectured as a phoneme for Proto-Semitic.."

_I'm not saying you're wrong. In fact I'm asking because I'm completely lost on this point, and it's abundantly clear you are much more knowledgable on it than I, so I am merely questioning you to try and find out more.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> The link you provided says only in two dialects of MSA, granted they are the two largest dialects (if I recall correctly).


It also mentioned Mehri. The link was missing in the Wikipedia article. I added it.





Abu Rashid said:


> As they say _"The sound is conjectured as a phoneme for Proto-Semitic.."_
> 
> I'm not saying you're wrong. In fact I'm asking because I'm completely lost on this point, and it's abundantly clear you are much more knowledgable on it than I, so I am merely questioning you to try and find out more.


Every reconstruction is a conjecture. No-one who could testify today ever heared a Proto-Semitic speaker. In this particular case, I'd say quite a solid one. It seems pretty clear that there originally were three sounds. The only debate is how they were realized.


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## berndf

It might be of interest to you. I found here an article on the web explaining the history of Arabic sound shifts. Arabic Shin (=Hebrew Sin) you find on page 6. There are more indication why the original pronunciation must have been lateral.


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## Aoyama

Thank you for the link. Will require some time to digest but most interesting.


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## clevermizo

Abu Rashid said:


> True but obviously they were all preserved quite well. I think Arabic speakers tend to pride themselves on their very distinct ability to distinguish between different sounds, which may even sound similar to outsiders. And have made sure they preserved them quite well.



This is a very romantic idea. However, the sound change we're talking about probably happened far into antiquity, and we have no idea what Arabic speakers thought of their Old Arabic languages back then, or how careful they were in preserving pronunciation. It might not have concerned them in the age before the classical pre-Islamic poetry. Certainly the preservation you mention becomes relevant in the Islamic period when the Arabic language became the religious language of Islam. You can't make a claim about how people felt about their language 2 thousand years ago based on this much more recent history. Unless one of those Old North Arabian graffiti says "WE LUV PRNNCING THNGZ RIGHT!"

Basically we don't know which sounds were switched around first nor where, nor is there any logical reason in my opinion to assume one group has kept it right over another.


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## Abu Rashid

> It might be of interest to you. I found here an article on the web explaining the history of Arabic sound shifts..



I read it, but most of that linguistic jargon is a little over my head.

But the general understanding I got from it is that they are trying to suggest that because some words with different letters have similar meanings, therefore one supposedly earlier form must've fused some of it's consonants to become the other. Seems quite a stretch to me. I dunno, perhaps if I understood the jargon a little better, I might be more convinced, it just sounds like a lot of guesswork and not much substance.

They did confirm what I asked though:


> Couldn't it be possible that Samekh was originally Sin... Are there for instance cognates which have Sin in Arabic, yet Samekh in Hebrew?




_"Furthermore, the sibilant /s/ in Arabic corresponds to two different phonemes of Proto-Semitic, represented by /s/ (samekh)..."._


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> But the general understanding I got from it is that they are trying to suggest that because some words with different letters have similar meanings, therefore one supposedly earlier form must've fused some of it's consonants to become the other.


There are many ways to reconstruct historic sound shifts. The main "weapon" of the linguist here is to compare obvious cognates (i.e. words of the same origin, i.e. Hebrew _Shalom_ and Arabic _Salam_). Comparing two languages is usually not enough, because this way you can e.g. not tell a merger in one language from a split in the other. Fortunately in language group like IE and Semitic we have so many different dialect and languages plus historical development stages of them that we usually can reconstruct the development. Sometimes these reconstructions only tell us about phonemes which must have been differentiated in a proto language without necessarily telling us how they were pronounced, like the famous h1, h2 and h3 sounds in PIE of which we don't know how they were articulated.
 
As these reconstructions progress we also sometimes have to revise our original assumptions about cognates. E.g. knowing only German and Latin one would be led to believe that Latin _habere_ and German_ haben_ (both meaning _to have_ and both sharing the exact same stem _hab-_) were cognates. Knowing more about Proto-Germanic sound shifts allows we now believe that German _haben_ is cognate to Latin _capere_ (meaning _to seize_; with sound shifts /k/>/h/, /p/>/b/). It is a bit like with GPS navigation systems: The more satellites you receive the more precise your measurements become.



Abu Rashid said:


> They did confirm what I asked though:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Couldn't it be possible that Samekh was originally Sin... Are there for instance cognates which have Sin in Arabic, yet Samekh in Hebrew?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _"Furthermore, the sibilant /s/ in Arabic corresponds to two different phonemes of Proto-Semitic, represented by /s/ (samekh)..."._
Click to expand...

Not quite. You asked about a single original phoneme ("original Sin") which split in Hebrew. The article talks about "two different" original ("Proto-Semitic") phonemes which merged in Arabic to /s/.


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## Abu Rashid

> There are many ways to  reconstruct historic sound shifts. The main "weapon" of the linguist  here is to compare obvious cognates




I can appreciate a method like that, but it doesn't seem like they did that. It seems as if they just compared Arabic synonyms. Unless they left a lot of their evidences out.




> Not quite. You asked about a  single original phoneme ("original Sin") which split in Hebrew. The  article talks about "two different" original ("Proto-Semitic") phonemes  which merged in Arabic to /s/.




True, but I just worded my original question badly. what I really meant to ask was, the letter that is Sin in Arabic today was it related etymologically to Samekh in the old alphabets like Phoenician, Aramaic etc. since Arabic never inherited a Samekh, but all of a sudden had a similar sounding letter called Sin.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> I can appreciate a method like that, but it doesn't seem like they did that. It seems as if they just compared Arabic synonyms. Unless they left a lot of their evidences out.


Sure, this isn't the whole story. I quoted the article mainly give a few…





berndf said:


> …more indication why the original pronunciation must have been *lateral*.


If the origin of the Hebrew Sin is both a sibilant and lateral everything points towards [ɬ]; that we find this very sound in South Arabian is then the icing on the cake.

The correspondence of unvoiced sibilants to proto-language phonemes is of mainly derived by etymological comparisons. Because we have all kind of two way mergers and languages where the all three are distinguishable there is enough material to cross-check.




Abu Rashid said:


> True, but I just worded my original question badly. what I really meant to ask was, the letter that is Sin in Arabic today was it related etymologically to Samekh in the old alphabets like Phoenician, Aramaic etc. since Arabic never inherited a Samekh, but all of a sudden had a similar sounding letter called Sin.


Ok. I see. Now that we have explored the phonemic history, we turn to writing systems and their application to phonemes. This is indeed a different issue. This is mostly contained in previous posts of Clevermizo and myself but let me recapitulate.

That in Hebrew spelling the use of the letters Samekh and Sin is etymologically consistent has something to do with the fact that the Phoenician alphabet is about 3000 years old and that Hebrew, as other Canaanite languages, started to use it that early. At that time Canaanite was most likely still a continuum of mutually intelligible dialects and the etymological correspondences were probably still obvious to people.

On the other hand, when the Arabs crafted their own alphabet from the Aramaic alphabet (mainly from Nabataean but possibly with Syriac and Hebrew influences; all these alphabets only differ in letter shape and contain the same 22 letters in the same sequence as the original Phoenician alphabet), about one and a half millennia later, there was no reason why the use of letters should be consisted with etymology. Arabic took the letter ש, which became Arabic س, to represent both Arabic phonemes /s/ and /ʃ/, i.e. originally, the Arabic alphabet did not differentiate Shin and Sin at all. There was no use for the Samekh as a separate letter and it was simply dropped (see here).

The separation of the original س into س andش was a second, independent development when diacritic markings were added to many letters to be able to differentiate all 28 Arabic consonants with an alphabet of only 15 distinguished shapes.


----------



## clevermizo

berndf said:


> The separation of the original س into س andش was a second, independent development when diacritic markings were added to many letters to be able to differentiate all 28 Arabic consonants with an alphabet of only 15 distinguished shapes.



Yes, I believe a fixed system of dots became especially important when necessary to read the Qur'an correctly - i.e., when there was a strong sociological reason to maintain correct pronunciation of symbols. 

Some reviews:

Revell, E.J. _The Diacritical Dots and the Development of the Arabic alphabet_. J. Semitic Studies, XX(2): p. 178, 1975.

Barud, BM. _Arabic Alphabet, Scripts and Palaeography, _in Gacek, A. _The Arabic Manuscript Tradition, _Ch. VI, 2008.

Greundler, B. _The Development of the Arabic Scripts: From the Nabatean Era to the First Islamic Century according to Dated Texts_. Scholars Press, 1993.


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## Abu Rashid

I just read a claim in the book "Ancient languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia" that Arabic up until the 9th. century actually had sin and shin reversed, the same as Hebrew, but then switched them in the 9th. century to how they are now.

This claim sounds extremely unlikely, since Arabic has been very well documented since before this time, and also hundreds of thousands of people in each generation memorised the entire contents of the Qur'an, which would've made it pretty much impossible to switch letters like that. Also by this time Arabic had spread to such far flung corners of the world, that surely some strains with the supposedly original usage of sin/shin would've remained (since Arabic was spoken from Spain to Sindh).

Does anybody have any information on this supposed switch in the 9th. century??


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## berndf

I sounds puzzling to me too. Are they talking about a real sound shift, i.e. was "Ismael" pronounced "Ishmael" as in Hebrew or are they talking about spelling only, i.e. "sh" without dots and "s" with three dots? Is it really talking about Classical Arabic of the 9th century A.D. or of Ancient North Arabian of the 9th century B.C.?


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## Abu Rashid

It seems to be stating that sin was pronounced as shin now is and shin was pronounced as sin now is, and it mentions a third letter (I assume samek). It stated it occurred after the time Sibuwayh (died late 8th. century C.E) and claimed that in his writings he describes the letters being different to how they've been used after the 9th. century.


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## Mahaodeh

If this is the case, I would imagin that this would have been common knowledge among the Arabs that that happened. Adding the dots to the letters was at an earlier time and we learn about it in the early years of school. Chaning the pronounciation of the letters is much more imporatant and I would imagin that it would have been taught to us.

This is the first time I hear anything like that. I tend to agree with berndf that if this did happen, it would have more likely happend in the 9th cen. BC, not AD. It is still possible that Sibwayh mentioned that about something that happend 1700 years earlier, provided that he actually had access to such information of course - another possibility is that he was comparing Arabic to Hebrew, not Arabic to a previous version of Arabic.


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## origumi

Mahaodeh said:


> another possibility is that he was comparing Arabic to Hebrew, not Arabic to a previous version of Arabic.


Or maybe to Nabatean Aramaic? Closer by geography and culture.


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## mugibil

I think a huge lot of the puzzles and misunderstandings in this thread are due to the fact that everybody is using the words sin, shin, and samekh without specifying whether he means sounds or letters. I'd recommend always saying "samekh/sin/shin letter" and "samekh/sin/shin sound". BTW, berndf, I admire your inexhaustible patience and balanced temper, I think you have the potential to be a teacher.


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## Abu Rashid

PLEASE NOTE: ALL DATES I'M USING ARE C.E (Christian Era) NOT B.C.E (Before Christian Era).



> This is the first time I hear anything like that. I tend to agree with  berndf that if this did happen, it would have more likely happend in the  9th cen. BC, not AD. It is still possible that Sibwayh mentioned that  about something that happend 1700 years earlier, provided that he  actually had access to such information of course - another possibility  is that he was comparing Arabic to Hebrew, not Arabic to a previous  version of Arabic.



Maha,

It's definitely talking about 9th century C.E and it's definitely talking only about classical Arabic. And it was claiming that what Sibawayh describes in his time (ie. in the 8th century C.E) about the sounds of the Arabic letters is the reverse of how we've known them since after his time (ie. from the 9th century C.E onwards).  I will perhaps post the relevant passage from it when I get time. Anyway seems nobody else has heard of it. But I was sure I saw someone post something about this in another thread somewhere, I thought it was berndf, but maybe not.


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## Abu Rashid

Mungu,

agreed 100%, perhaps because most of us are not linguists and therefore don't know the correct terminology.

Anyway, the point here is that sin and shin sounds in Arabic and Hebrew are reversed to one another, regardless of the letters used to write them. For instance Shalom/Salaam type cognates show that the two sounds are reversed, and this is consistent in almost all cognates between the two languages. The book I was reading claims that in the 9th century C.E that Arabic reversed them, and prior to this they were the same as Hebrew. ie. Arabs prior to 9th century C.E said Shalaam not Salaam.


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## Abu Rashid

"We know from the phonetic descriptions by the early Arab grammarian Sibawaihi (died c. AD 796) that in early Classical Arabic, س the reflex of Proto-Semitic */s/ + */š/, was pronounced something approaching [š], and that ش the reflex of Proto-Semitic */ś/, was pronounced something approaching [ɬ]. It was only subsequently that the pronunciation of س shifted to [s] (sin), and that of ش to the [š] (šin) of later Arabic."

It then provides a table which is something like this:

Proto-Semitic___Arabic (before 9th. century AD)___Arabic (after 9th. century AD)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*/š/ }
_____}______->________           [š] written س________->________[s] written س
*/s/ }

*/ś/_________->________[ɬ] written ش_________->________[š] written ش


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## Abu Rashid

So it seems they're claiming that because sin and shin the sounds were written both without dots before 9th. century C.E therefore they were both the same sound, which was the current sound of shin. Then they shifted to the sound of current sin after this time.

It would seem to me they're making these claims to try and "fit" Arabic into the way they already perceive Hebrew/Aramaic etc. So for instance, the word for sun in Hebrew is šamš, whilst in Arabic it is šams, therefore they assume in Arabic shin/sin must've been merged and become unmerged and confused so one took the first position in that word and the other took the last position, whilst in Hebrew it's the same letter in both positions.

This seems to come from a position whereby etymologically Hebrew is considered older and therefore more correct, and the anomaly in Arabic must be due to a confusion of sounds.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> "We know from the phonetic descriptions by the early Arab grammarian Sibawaihi (died c. AD 796) that in early Classical Arabic, س the reflex of Proto-Semitic */s/ + */š/, was pronounced something approaching [š], and that ش the reflex of Proto-Semitic */ś/, was pronounced something approaching [ɬ]. It was only subsequently that the pronunciation of س shifted to [s] (sin), and that of ش to the [š] (šin) of later Arabic."
> 
> It then provides a table which is something like this:
> 
> Proto-Semitic___Arabic (before 9th. century AD)___Arabic (after 9th. century AD)
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> */š/ }
> _____}______->________           [š] written س________->________[s] written س
> */s/ }
> 
> */ś/_________->________[ɬ] written ش_________->________[š] written ش


Ok, that makes sense. Let me express this in my words: This quote describes the process of simplification of Arabic Shin from [ɬ] to [ʃ] which I explained earlier. At the time this happened "(after 9th. century AD)" the two Proto-Semitic sounds
the reflex of which are  Hebrew/Aramaic Semekh and Shin were already merged to a single sound  [ʃ]. When the [ɬ] moved to [ʃ] the existing [ʃ] moved to [s], probably in order to keep the sounds distinct.

So it is not two phonemes exchanging realizations but one sound moving to an already occupied position "pushing" the old occupant away to a third position which was previously empty.

My own guess (which I can't prove, it is just a guess) is that the earlier realization of س was not exactly a [ʃ] but floating between [s] and [ʃ] similar to the Greek Sigma or the Spanish <s>. When [ɬ] moved to [ʃ], the existing sound couldn't to pronounced so laxly any more and firmly became [s].


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## Abu Rashid

As I mentioned before, I cannot fathom how this could've occurred in the 9th. century, since knowledge about the Arabic language was so well documented since then, and there's no record of any shift, and also the fact that so many people individually memorised the entire Qur'an, preserving every single little sound, jot and piece of it. And the fact Arabic was by this time widespread, there's no way such a shift could've occurred.

As I said, I think this is more a case of trying to reconcile Arabic to what's happened in the Semitic languages the Western scholars were more familiar with (like Hebrew & Aramaic).


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## clevermizo

berndf said:


> My own guess (which I can't prove, it is just a guess) is that the earlier realization of س was not exactly a [ʃ] but floating between [s] and [ʃ] similar to the Greek Sigma or the Spanish <s>. When [ɬ] moved to [ʃ], the existing sound couldn't to pronounced so laxly any more and firmly became [s].



This is really a great point. We have examples of languages in which the phoneme written as /s/ is actually somewhat intermediate between [s] and [ʃ] (while true of what I've heard of Iberian Spanish, Latin American Spanish is unambiguous [s]).

Furthermore, we find that final -s or sC (where C is a consonant) is pronounced as [ʃ] in continental and some Brazilian Portuguese I believe. This could represent a further development of an intermediate sound.

Still, I don't see any compelling reason to think any of the Semitic languages had it "right" first and then just "switched them". It's much more an organic process whereby as berndf suggests, there is an intermediate sound. The Iberian /s/ for example I can hear as easily becoming [s] or [ʃ], and I dare say something similar occurred in Semitic languages.


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## Outsider

Abu Rashid said:


> It would seem to me they're making these claims to try and "fit" Arabic into the way they already perceive Hebrew/Aramaic etc. So for instance, the word for sun in Hebrew is šamš, whilst in Arabic it is šams, therefore they assume in Arabic shin/sin must've been merged and become unmerged and confused so one took the first position in that word and the other took the last position, whilst in Hebrew it's the same letter in both positions.
> 
> This seems to come from a position whereby etymologically Hebrew is considered older and therefore more correct, and the anomaly in Arabic must be due to a confusion of sounds.


The word _shamash_ (= _šamš_?) can also be found in Akkadian.

P.S. It might be worthy of note that Arabic "s" usually became "ç"/"c" (not "s"/"ss"!) in Old Portuguese.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> As I mentioned before, I cannot fathom how this could've occurred in the 9th. century, since knowledge about the Arabic language was so well documented since then, and there's no record of any shift, and also the fact that so many people individually memorised the entire Qur'an, preserving every single little sound, jot and piece of it. And the fact Arabic was by this time widespread, there's no way such a shift could've occurred.


As I said, it surprises me too that it should have happened that late. On the other hand, pure shifts in realization are compatible with the preservationist attitude towards the Qur'an as long as the phonemic distinctions are preserved.

There are some indication of realization changes in classical times. E.g. the classification of ﺟ (_dgim_) as a moon letter is inconsistent with the modern pronunciation [dʒ] and it must have been a dosal consonant in classical Arabic, e.g. [g].



Abu Rashid said:


> As I said, I think this is more a case of trying to reconcile Arabic to what's happened in the Semitic languages the Western scholars were more familiar with (like Hebrew & Aramaic).


This observation doesn't seem very logical to me as the reconstruction of the Proto-Semitic origin of Hebrew Sin/Arabic Shin as [ɬ] was driven by the analysis of Arabian languages and ancient or present forms of Hebrew or Aramaic did not contribute to this.
I think you are too much hooked on [s] vs. [ʃ]. The distinction between the two must have been quite insignificant at some point in the history of Arabic (that س is etymologically the result of a merger of two sounds is sufficiently clear) and the important distinction must have been between lateral ([ɬ]) vs. non-lateral ([s]/[ʃ]).

But I suggest you study the relevant passages from Sibawayh yourself in order to form your own opinion.


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## Abu Rashid

> As I said, it surprises me too that it should have happened that late.  On the other hand, pure shifts in realization are compatible with the  preservationist attitude towards the Qur'an as long as the phonemic  distinctions are preserved.


I don't think you appreciate just how important Muslims consider correct pronunciation of the Qur'an. The study of tajweed (perfection of Qur'anic sounds) and the correct makhraj (realisation of sounds from their exit points of the mouth) is something that receives a great deal of attention, and the idea a sound could just suddenly change like that is pretty much impossible.

With Arabic being spread from Iberia to Sindh in that time, one would think the drift could not have occurred in all places at once, since it's much too vast a land.

There are well known cases of sound shifts in Arabic since that time, but only ever in vernacular dialects, not in Fus7a.



> There are some indication of realization changes in classical times.  E.g. the classification of ﺟ (_dgim_) as a  moon letter is inconsistent with the modern pronunciation [dʒ] and it  must have been a dosal consonant in classical Arabic, e.g. [g].


That would be more feasible since we have places where that's the case (like urban Egypt). But it's unlikely, since again, the correct Qur'anic pronunciation is with the 'j' sound not the 'g' sound, even in Egypt.



> This observation doesn't seem very logical to me as the reconstruction  of the Proto-Semitic origin of Hebrew Sin/Arabic Shin as [ɬ] was driven  by the analysis of Arabian languages and ancient or present forms of  Hebrew or Aramaic did not contribute to this.


In that book I quoted from above, they say they base these claims also on the fact of how words were borrowed from Aramaic. So it does seem to be that the north-west semitic languages are being used as a baseline.

Which seems strange to me, because if we were to base it on how words borrowed between languages, then we'd come to the conclusion that Hebrew/Aramaic have the sin/shin mixed up, because in the Greek/Latin forms of Biblical names, sin/shin are reversed almost consistently.



> I think you are too much hooked on [s] vs. [ʃ].


Yes, it is the central issue here.



> The distinction between the two must have been quite insignificant at  some point in the history of Arabic (that س is etymologically the result  of a merger of two sounds is sufficiently clear)


I don't think you've provided any evidence for this at all. Sin/Shin have always been quite distinct in Arabic as far as I'm aware. What exactly are you basing this on?? why is it sufficiently clear?



> But I suggest you study the relevant passages from Sibawayh yourself in  order to form your own opinion.



No actual reference was given to his works, merely that he supposedly mentioned it. And I very much doubt he'd have mentioned it, and Arabic linguists had been unaware of him mentioning it all this time. Sounds to me more like something they've concluded from something he said, which might remotely relate to such things.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> I don't think you appreciate just how important Muslims consider correct pronunciation of the Qur'an.


Those traditions usually develop over time. Sound shifts in the early days of the Quran are more plausible than at later stages. The aledged time of the shift (after 300 years) surprises me, to say the least. But the nature of the development is correct.


Abu Rashid said:


> In that book I quoted from above, they say they base these claims also on the fact of how words were borrowed from Aramaic. So it does seem to be that the north-west semitic languages are being used as a baseline.


Again, my view is that "s" and "sh" weren't well distinguished at the time. Hence either of the two ended up as Sin in loans. Important is the different nature of the Shin as a lateral sound which prohibits imports as Sin. Arguing that loans from Hebrew or Aramaic Shin as Sin proves that the Sin was realized ss "sh" is in my mind faulty logic. I would be very surprised, if this were the reasoning.



Abu Rashid said:


> Which seems strange to me, because if we were to base it on how words borrowed between languages, then we'd come to the conclusion that Hebrew/Aramaic have the sin/shin mixed up, because in the Greek/Latin forms of Biblical names, sin/shin are reversed almost consistently.


No, we wouldn't because neither Greek nor Latin distinguished between "s" and "sh". Hence there is nothing to confuse.



Abu Rashid said:


> Yes, it is the central issue here.


The central issue is that we are talking about 3 phonemes in the proto language and not 2. Arabic has lost one of them as did Hebrew and Aramaic.



Abu Rashid said:


> I don't think you've provided any evidence for this at all. Sin/Shin have always been quite distinct in Arabic as far as I'm aware. What exactly are you basing this on?? why is it sufficiently clear?


I said Arabic Sin is the result of a merger. Shin was always different. Only the realization of Shin has changed over time. Evidence for this is the analysis of cognates. E.g. Arabic Sin can correspond to Hebrew Samekh or to Hebrew Shin but never to Sin. This says nothing about the realization of the original phonemes but shows that there must have 3, 2 of them merging to become Arabic Sin while the 3rd (Arabic Shin) remained separate.


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## mugibil

> (berndf: that س is etymologically the result of a merger of two sounds is sufficiently clear)
> 
> Abu Rashid: I don't think you've provided any evidence for this at all. Sin/Shin have always been quite distinct in Arabic as far as I'm aware. What exactly are you basing this on?? why is it sufficiently clear?



To the best of my knowledge, the evidence for a distinction between three different Proto-Semitic sibilants is as reliable as anything in historical linguistics. This conclusion has been arrived at through the standard comparative method used for all languages all over the world. Arabic has only two sibilants left, so it's mixed two of the three. This is completely natural, since it has evolved and changed just like all other languages, including Hebrew. In fact - I have the feeling that I need to point this out - this is just one of _many_ changes that Arabic has undergone with respect to Proto-Semitic according to science. 

As for the later shift (not reversal!) in pronunciation discussed in the last posts (ɬ > ʃ and ʃ > s), I am not acquainted with the exact evidence, but there is no justification for excluding the possibility of it. It is very plausible in linguistic terms, the shift is towards sounds that are less "marked" (i.e. more usual and simpler to pronounce), and is not even phonemic (meaning-distinguishing), but merely a detail in phonetic realization which speakers may well have been unaware of or unable to control. This happens in language all the time, and there is no scientific reason to doubt that such a thing would have happened in Arabic. In fact, it would have been _extremely_ strange if it hadn't. No amount of effort could have made sure that modern standard Arabic pronunciation remains _exactly_ the same as in the times of Muhammad. Indian linguistics developed in an extremely impressive way in order to preserve every detail of Sanskrit, yet even they didn't manage to preserve the original pronunciation in every detail ([v] for [w] is one example I remember). I am not aware of Arabic linguistics having reached a similar level in the 9th century, but even if it had, it still wouldn't have been able to achieve this task. No language, liturgical or not, sacred or not, has managed to avoid phonetic change, despite all efforts for preservation - not Ancient Greek, not Hebrew, not Latin, not Avestan, not Sumerian.

I'm sorry, but I think that this is really an ideological discussion between mainstream science on the one hand and faith and patriotism on the other. The real underlying question seems to be whether Arabic is a language of mortals that has arisen from a proto-language, changed with respect with that proto-language, then further developed and changed in its history just like any other language, or whether it is somehow perfect, primordial and unchangeable. If one wants to take the latter position, then - I'm sorry this is going to sound sharp - but in that case one's only choice is to deny linguistics as a science, declare it an anti-Arabic conspiracy, and stick to religion alone. I won't be posting in this thread any more - I think it is pointless to do so, and even reading it is rather exasperating.


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## Abu Rashid

berndf,



> Those traditions usually develop over time. Sound shifts in the early  days of the Quran are more plausible than at later stages. The aledged  time of the shift (after 300 years) surprises me, to say the least. But  the nature of the development is correct.



This tradition was developed in the earliest days of the Islamic period, and has continued in unbroken chain until today. I don't think there's any comparable attempt in human history to preserve and maintain a language and it's primary text like there has been in Arabic.



> Again, my view is that "s" and "sh" weren't well distinguished at the  time.



The only evidence we have suggests they were always well distinguished (at least in the Islamic period), so I don't see why you've taken this view. Prior to the Islamic period there's not much documentary evidence to suggest either way. This is different to the case of Hebrew for instance where it's quite clear that there's been a long history of confusion of sin/shin (eg. shibboleth) and 'tha' as well.

Also if they were merged and then became unmerged, wouldn't we expect all the sin and shin roots and words to be mixed up as well? Since if they weren't well distinguished then there'd be no way of having unmerged them correctly, especially not if it just happened as a natural process, rather than purposefully.

This just doesn't make sense at all.



> No, we wouldn't because neither Greek nor Latin distinguished between  "s" and "sh".



Yet in some cases they did. For instance Shlomoh became Solomon, yet Yishmael became Ishmael. But in the vast majority of cases, they transliterated Hebrew shin as 's', as it is in Arabic.



> The central issue is that we are talking about 3 sounds and not 2.



The third is the Hebrew/Aramaic samek am I correct? If so, then according to that chart above, roots with samek should be shin in Arabic today, yet I've not seen any cases where they are. All of the words with shin in Arabic seem to have sin in Hebrew, not samek. If the table above were correct, then we'd expect to see words with Hebrew samek having shin in Arabic today. Whilst words with sin or shin in Hebrew should now have only sin in Arabic, and be mixed up, unless they coincidentally reversed themselves perfectly.

The fact that between Arabic and Hebrew, words are exactly reversed between sin and shin, indicates that these two sounds themselves have undergone some process in one of the languages, including the third sound into the equation is only confusing it.



> I said Arabic Sin is the result of a merger. Shin was always different.  Only the realization of Shin has changed over time.



Supposedly a merger between Proto-Semitic sin and shin, right? Again, that doesn't match up with the situation of Arabic today at all.


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## Abu Rashid

mungu,



> To the best of my knowledge, the evidence for a distinction between  three different Proto-Semitic sibilants is as reliable as anything in  historical linguistics. This conclusion has been arrived at through the  standard comparative method used for all languages all over the world.  Arabic has only two sibilants left, so it's mixed two of the three.


You say this with such confidence, indicating you have some understanding of how it came about, please share. Also it may well be the case, all I'm asking for is some explanation about the supposed mechanisms of how it happened, which so far I've not seen.

You may have full confidence in the fact anything done by a comparative method must always be right, I do not. It often turns out to be wrong.



> This is completely natural, since it has evolved and changed just like  all other languages, including Hebrew.


Since the beginning of the Islamic period, no, it has not. It has been strictly preserved. Comparing it to Hebrew in this respect is just ludicrous. Hebrew ceased being used as a widespread language for several millenia, and had obviously undergone a lot of changes before it began to be preserved anyway. Arabic on the other hand has been well preserved and spoken until the present day.

Also vital to the preservation of Arabic has been the diglossia, which permitted the formal strain to be protected from everyday "wear and tear" which instead was inflicted upon the informal vernaculars, each of which shows many changes.



> In fact - I have the feeling that I need to point this out - this is  just one of _many_ changes that Arabic has undergone with respect  to Proto-Semitic according to science.


We've already discussed in another thread in this forum the fact that Arabic is quite conservative with regards to supposed Proto-Semitic features. Certainly no living Semitic language maintains the same level of conservative features, and I'm not aware of any attested extinct variety that does either.

Does that mean it hasn't changed at all? I doubt it, but it's certainly very conservative in most respects, especially in regards to the grammatical features of the language.



> As for the later shift (not reversal!)


If it's a shift and not a reversal, then how do you explain that so many words have the exact opposite letter? Almost perfectly, one can predict that where Hebrew has sin, a cognate in Arabic will have shin, and where Hebrew has shin, a cognate in Arabic will have sin. This sounds like a reversal to me.



> It is very plausible in linguistic terms, the shift is towards sounds  that are less "marked" (i.e. more usual and simpler to pronounce)


If there's one thing the Arabic language is well known for, it is it's maintaining of difficult to pronounce sounds. So this doesn't sound like a plausible explanation at all.



> No amount of effort could have made sure that modern standard Arabic  pronunciation remains _exactly_ the same as in the times of  Muhammad.


You are aware the Arabic is diglossic right? And that the Arabic we are discussing here was artificially preserved as a high literary form, whilst the vernaculars did indeed undergo lots of changes?



> Indian linguistics developed in an extremely impressive way in order to  preserve every detail of Sanskrit, yet even they didn't manage to  preserve the original pronunciation in every detail ([v] for [w] is one  example I remember).


Sanskrit is not preserved as a living language today, and likewise I don't know of any tradition of Hindus committing the entire Hindu texts to memory. So the situation of Sanskrit is simply not the same.



> I am not aware of Arabic linguistics having reached a similar level in  the 9th century, but even if it had, it still wouldn't have been able to  achieve this task.


Preserving a language doesn't require a high level of linguistics as far as I'm aware. Anymore than guarding the entrance to a cave requires a high level of knowledge about geology.



> No language, liturgical or not, sacred or not, has managed to avoid  phonetic change, despite all efforts for preservation - not Ancient  Greek, not Hebrew, not Latin, not Avestan, not Sumerian.


Since none of those languages have unbroken spoken chains until the present day, it's kind of difficult to compare. And again none of them were ever protected for the purpose of preserving a sacred text which was committed to memory by many people in each and every generation.



> I'm sorry, but I think that this is really an ideological discussion  between mainstream science on the one hand and faith and patriotism on  the other...


The rest of your post just descends, after this point, into a rant of accusations about my intentions for asking these questions, and I won't dignify the rest of it with a response.

Good day.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Yet in some cases they did. For instance Shlomoh became Solomon, yet Yishmael became Ishmael. But in the vast majority of cases, they transliterated Hebrew shin as 's', as it is in Arabic.


Nope, _Ishmael_ is English, not Latin. Latin is _Ismael_. The digraph "sh" didn't exist in Latin. Latin didn't have a sound corresponding to English "sh" and needed no sign for it.





Abu Rashid said:


> The third is the Hebrew/Aramaic samek am I correct? If so, then according to that chart above, roots with samek should be shin in Arabic today, yet I've not seen any cases where they are. All of the words with shin in Arabic seem to have sin in Hebrew, not samek. If the table above were correct, then we'd expect to see words with Hebrew samek having shin in Arabic today. Whilst words with sin or shin in Hebrew should now have only sin in Arabic, and be mixed up, unless they coincidentally reversed themselves perfectly.


You should really read more carefully. I told you several times:
Hebrew Samekh *and* Hebrew Shin = Arabic Sin.
Hebrew Sin = Arabic Shin.



Abu Rashid said:


> Supposedly a merger between Proto-Semitic sin and shin, right?


No not in Arabic. This merger occurred in Phoenician.

Let me recapitulate, and please do me a favour and read it carefully. This table compares reconstructed Proto-Semitic (PS) and dead Phoenician with three living Languages. For the living languages I also noted the current sound values.

PS..Phoenician..Hebrew........Arabic.......South Arabian
s1 .Samekh......[s] - Samekh..[s] - Sin....[s]
s2                   .Shin........[ʃ] - Shin.....[s] - Sin....[ʃ]/
s3  .Shin........[s] - Sin.....[ʃ] - Shin....[ɬ]

 As you can see the situation is much more complex than a simple "reversal".


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## Abu Rashid

> Nope, _Ishmael_ is English, not Latin. Latin is _Ismael_. The  digraph "sh" didn't exist in Latin. Latin didn't have a sound  corresponding to English "sh" and needed no sign for it.



You are right there, my mistake.



> You should really read more carefully. I told you several times:



My apologies for testing your patience, it's much clearer what you were saying now that you put that table. Amazing how much difference a little visualisation makes. Now that I see you are saying Hebrew Samekh is equal to PS-s1 and not to PS-s3.



> Let me recapitulate, and please do me a favour and read it carefully. This table compares reconstructed Proto-Semitic (PS) and  dead Phoenician with three living Languages. For the living languages I  also noted the current sound values.




I'm not exactly sure how you've gotten those values for Ancient South Arabian, but according to the book I quoted above your values don't seem correct.

The book uses a notation like you used for Proto-Semitic of s1, s2 & s3. It then notes that they were previously represented as s, š & ś respectively, which I assume correspond to your [s], [ʃ] & [ɬ] respectively. If I am wrong, please correct. If you think I just haven't read carefully enough, then please disregard and leave my questions for one more patient than yourself to answer.

The book also transliterates s1 as s and s2 as š, matching the Arabic pronunciation of the corresponding etymological letter in cognate words.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> ...it's much clearer what you were saying now that you put that table. Amazing how much difference a little visualisation makes.


I am sorry I had been unclear before.





Abu Rashid said:


> The book uses a notation like you used for Proto-Semitic of s1, s2 & s3. It then notes that they were previously represented as s, š & ś respectively, which I assume correspond to your [s], [ʃ] & [ɬ] respectively.


You are right. The symbols s, š and ś are used by Semiticists while I used IPA. I used IPA characters on purpose to make it clear that I am speaking about specific sounds. The symbols *s, *š and *ś are also used to denote the reconstructed phonemes I called s1, s2 and s3.


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## Abu Rashid

> I am sorry I had been unclear before.


Well not necessarily unclear, I'm just not really up to speed with all the linguistics jargon, so seeing it in a table is much clearer for me.



> You are right. The symbols s, š and ś are  used by Semiticists while I used IPA. I used IPA characters on purpose  to make it clear that I am speaking about specific sounds. The symbols  *s, *š and *ś are also used to denote the reconstructed phonemes I  called s1, s2 and s3.


If that's the case, then your column for OSA is incorrect. (note: I was asking about the order, not the symbols used)

OSA-s2 is equivalent to Arabic shin (etymologically) not Arabic sin as your table suggests. This means that if you flip the sin/shin for Arabic and for Hebrew, then it would make more sense, both to me (ie. what I was trying to express earlier), and in respect to OSA. And wouldn't make any difference regarding Phoenician, since both are shin, and would still account for samek merging into Arabic sin.


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## berndf

I was talking about Modern Southern Arabian (to take a living language). I have checked my memory against this table, as I am not an expert on Southern Arabian, whether old or new. The table states that *s, *š and *ś correspond to to [s], [ʃ] and [ɬ] in that order.

But what I am sure about without checking is that *s, *š and *ś correspond to Modern Standard Arabic [s], [s] and[ʃ] in that order.

According to the table you quoted, the shift in *Arabic* happened in two stages. It assumes that PS *s, *š and *ś were [s], [ʃ] and [ɬ] as in Modern South Arabian. Than the two stages were the following:
*s: [s] > [ʃ] > [s]
*š: [ʃ] > [ʃ] > [s]
*ś: [ɬ] > [ɬ] > [ʃ]

My assumption (and I think that of the Authors of your book as well) is that [ʃ] in the middle column wasn't a "true" [ʃ] (English "sh") but something in between [s] and [ʃ] (they say "approaching [š]"). They state that stage 1 was completed in Quranic times but stage 2 as late as the 9th century. The logic of these two shifts appear very plausible to me. But the timing surprises me. But I am not so adamant as you are that this is impossible. In Jewish tradition (with which I am more familiar than with Islamic tradition though I am neither a Jew nor a Muslim) where the exact preservation of the Tanakh is similarly important as the preservation of the Quran in Islamic tradition, the process of describing the pronunciation (development of the Niqqud system) took several centuries.


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## Abu Rashid

Sorry I thought you said Old South Arabian.

It would be interesting to see how Aramaic fits into this as well.


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## berndf

To my knowledge [s], [ʃ] and [ɬ] in Earlier Aramaic (before 7th century BC) and later [s], [ʃ] and [s], same as in Hebrew.


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## origumi

While Aramaic and Hebrew are rather consistent, it's enough to open Genesis and find immediately inconsistencies. For example the Aramaic root כנש k-n-sh is equivalent to Hebrew k-n-s כנס (to gather). Or the Aramatic root פרש p-r-sh and Hebrew פרס p-r-s (to separate, go in different directions).


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## Abu Rashid

> But the timing surprises me. But I am not so adamant as you are that  this is impossible. In Jewish tradition (with which I am more familiar  than with Islamic tradition though I am neither a Jew nor a Muslim)  where the exact preservation of the Tanakh is similarly important as the  preservation of the Quran in Islamic tradition, the process of  describing the pronunciation (development of the Niqqud system) took  several centuries.



I don't think you appreciate fully the concept of the HuffaZ (lit. Preservers). Large numbers of people in every single generation, have completely committed to memory the entire text of the Qur'an. This is a lengthy process, which takes on average several years of dedicated study (in the presence of a qualified HafiZ (lit. preserver). The study involves learning precise pronunciation, rules of tajweed (perfection of sound), and then memorisation of the texts themselves. This process has continued in thousands, and eventually millions of unbroken chains, which all lead back to Muhammad (pbuh) himself. I think anyone who actually examined this process, would also find it quite unfathomable how sound changes could occur knowing how this process works. There are variant readings (known as Qir'aat) of the Qur'an, but as far as I'm aware none of them are in respect to pronunciation of sin/shin. I know those who don't subscribe to religious beliefs would be quick to dismiss such things because of their religious connections, but there's no need to take into account any of the religious connections of the process, but merely the process itself.

On top of this, we have the fact that Arabic had spread to such vast and often geographically isolated parts of the world, yet the supposed pre-9th. century pronunciations didn't remain in any area? Seems extremely strange to me. How a language could be spoken from Spain to India and yet a change such as this could occur, and would be propagated out to all lands just like that, with no trace of the change at all.

It just doesn't compute.

It seems they are trying to make the facts fit the assumptions.

There has to be a better explanation, which I shall endeavour to find.


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## Abu Rashid

> While Aramaic and Hebrew are rather consistent, it's enough to open  Genesis and find immediately inconsistencies. For example the Aramaic  root כנש k-n-sh is equivalent to Hebrew k-n-s כנס (to gather). Or the  Aramatic root פרש p-r-sh and Hebrew פרס p-r-s (to separate, go in  different directions).


Of course there's always anomalies, but I think in most cases Hebrew and Aramaic will agree. Likewise in most cases Arabic and Hebrew will agree (reversed of course), but there's probably some cases where it doesn't.

Btw kanasa in Arabic means to scavenge, and also to sweep, guess that's related to gathering. That's an interesting case because Aramaic and Hebrew seem to show the two different letters which are supposedly equivalent to Arabic sin.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> The study involves learning precise pronunciation, rules of tajweed (perfection of sound)


Well, the system of Makhaarij and Sifaat as we know it now didn't fall from heaven but needed a few centuries to develop.


Abu Rashid said:


> On top of this, we have the fact that Arabic had spread to such vast and often geographically isolated parts of the world...


Good point. On the other hand, Arabic was probably not yet the language of the common people in the conquered originally non-Arabic areas.


Abu Rashid said:


> There has to be a better explanation, which I shall endeavour to find.


Bon Chance! Let me know if you find anything.

In the meantime I found this. It reconstructs the early classical Shin as [ç] (as in German "i*ch*", Scots "bri*ch*t"="bright" or Byzantine/Modern Greek "*Χ*ίμαιρα") which is much closer to its modern sound value. In actual fact this is consistent with the makhraj of Shin which is defined as the back of the tongue approaching the hard palate.

N.B.: Of course, all this doesn't change the big picture, i.e. the corresponence pattern between different Semitic languages or the reconstruction of Proto-Semitic. We are now exclusively discussing possible transitional stages and their timing.


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## Abu Rashid

> Well, the system of Makhaarij and Sifaat as we know it now didn't fall  from heaven but needed a few centuries to develop.


It was taught, just perhaps not as systematically as it soon developed into. One thing is for sure it was a very strong impetus for the features of the Arabic script to be developed, in order to preserve the pronunciation. The dots were added to letters within the lifetime of the first or second Khalifah (Caliph) I think.



> Good point. On the other hand, Arabic was probably not yet the language  of the common people in the conquered originally non-Arabic areas.


Perhaps not of the majority, but fairly large garrison populations migrated from the Arabian peninsula into those lands, and they were probably the largest source of Arabic for the newly Arabicised peoples. Surely it must've survived somewhere if all those people who migrated out of the peninsula were supposedly pronouncing the letters that way.



> Bon Chance! Let me know if you find anything.


Thanks. I have mostly been looking to OSA (Old South Arabian), since it has 3 's' letters. I am curious why you said MSA languages have preserved the sounds exactly as they were in Proto-Semitic? What is the reasoning behind this? But since the table on wikipedia doesn't list OSA languages, I'm not quite sure how it fits in exactly.

Also the various ways of transcribing is still causing me some grief. I am still not sure exactly what the symbol ś represents for instance. Is it a sound? It seems to be used fairly differently depending which language it's referring to. In Hebrew it refers to sin am I right? or samekh?

I have found that OSA seems to match up with Arabic as far as shin is concerned, so that would mean that if that process which is meant to have occurred with Arabic was correct, then it must've co-incidentally have happened with OSA as well (about 1500+ years earlier), even though OSA didn't seem to have merged the other letters.



> In the meantime I found this. It reconstructs the early classical Shin as  [ç] (as in German "i*ch*", Scots "bri*ch*t"="bright" or  Byzantine/Modern Greek "*Χ*ίμαιρα") which is much closer to its  modern sound value. In actual fact this is consistent with the makhraj  of Shin which is defined as the back of the tongue approaching the hard  palate.


I had a read of this. It seems pretty vague to me. It's relying purely on their interpretation of how Sibawayh described a sound, yet no other linguist for 1300 years noticed this until now. I think that's a bit of a slim 'evidence' to make these claims on. Sure keep it in mind as an interesting observation, but I don't think it can be used to make such sweeping claims regarding the language. The factors which would go against such a shift occurring are much stronger imho, as mentioned above, the extreme care taken to preserve and maintain the sounds, and the vast expanse of land that Arabic was distributed over.

Also keep in mind that Sibawayh was not a native Arab, so it's possible he may have carried his own language's bias into his descriptions of Arabic (just food for thought).

Another point is how do we know how "shin" actually sounded in ancient Akkadian, Hebrew, Ugaritic, Aramaic etc? let alone Proto-Semitic. Is it pretty much just based on the fact that Hebrew/Aramaic speakers today pronounce it like this? (since the rest of those languages are extinct) It seems to me so far that there is a division between north and south Semitic languages on this issue. And the south (including Arabic) pronounce it [s] whilst the north pronounce it [š]. I just don't see how we can know which one was the correct Proto-Semitic pronunciation?


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Thanks. I have mostly been looking to OSA (Old South Arabian), since it has 3 's' letters. I am curious why you said MSA languages have preserved the sounds exactly as they were in Proto-Semitic? What is the reasoning behind this? But since the table on wikipedia doesn't list OSA languages, I'm not quite sure how it fits in exactly.
> 
> Also the various ways of transcribing is still causing me some grief. I am still not sure exactly what the symbol ś represents for instance. Is it a sound? It seems to be used fairly differently depending which language it's referring to. In Hebrew it refers to sin am I right? or samekh?


Yes, the notation is not always consistent; especially for transcribing OSA the notation is sometimes changes, that's why I avoided it in my earlier posts in this thread. USUALLY, *s is the PS phoneme which evolved into Hebrew Samekh, *š into Hebrew Shin and *ś into Hebrew Sin.


Abu Rashid said:


> Sure keep it in mind as an interesting observation, but I don't think it can be used to make such sweeping claims regarding the language.


Well, the intriguing thing about this reconstruction is that it is *not* sweeping. I don't know, if you have ever noticed, but there are to quite different ways to produce a [ʃ]: one is with an upward pointing tip of the tongue in a post-alveolar position and the other is with a downward bend tongue where the airflow constriction is made with the back of the tongue. This first type of [ʃ] is e.g. the French "ch", the second is used by many German speakers to pronounce the "sch". The position of tongue of this second [ʃ] is almost identical to that of the [ç]. The traditional description of Shin, Jim and Yaa to share the same makhraj points towards a [ç]. The change from [ç] to a type II [ʃ] is really minute.

I've always been puzzled why IPA does not systematically distinguish between these two types of [ʃ]. Maybe I'll open a thread on this subject one of these days.


Abu Rashid said:


> I just don't see how we can know which one was the correct Proto-Semitic pronunciation?


The precise PS sound values will of cause always remain guesses though we have good reason to assume that *s and *š are frontal while *ś was lateral. The most popular guesses I gave in post #2.


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## Abu Rashid

> Well, the intriguing thing about this reconstruction is that it is *not* sweeping.



I think it is sweeping because it goes to a lot of effort to try and show how Arabic (and by extension most of the Southern Semitic languages too) supposedly switched shin/sin in order to fit it into what is known about Hebrew and Aramaic.



> The precise PS sound values will of cause always remain guesses though we have good reason to assume that *s and *š are frontal while *ś was lateral.




It seems to me they are based fairly closely around assumptions made from Hebrew pronunciation and then they've tried to fit everything else into that framework.

ِAlso with the table you listed, which South Arabian language specifically is that for? Because according to wiktionary's Proto-Semitic roots pages, Mehri for instance (the largest MSA language), pronounces the word for 'peace' as selom not shelom (ie. same as Arabic does). And as far as I was aware all of the Southern Semitic languages are the same. It is only the Northern Semitic languages which supposedly use a [ʃ], and that's mostly assumed, since there's few living Northern Semitic languages to confirm it, as far as I can tell.


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## Abu Rashid

Ok, here's the conclusions I've come to from examining OSA (and also MSA) which as far as I can tell are the only Semitic languages which have 3 clear and separate graphemes for each of the 3 different postulated Proto-Semitic sounds.

I ended up inventing my own names for Proto-Semitic because I found the various schemes unhelpful, and because they seem to have been assigned the Hebrew pronunciation by default. I'm not saying the Hebrew pronunciation isn't correct, but I just don't see how it can be assumed to be the default position to take. The scheme I used was to get 3 roots common to many Semitic languages, which begin with the 3 separate phonemes, and then use them to refer to that phoneme in Proto-Semitic.

So they are satiated (for Arabic شبع and Hebrew שׂבע), conceal (for Arabic ستر and Hebrew סתר) and peace (for Arabic سلم and Hebrew שׁלם) *ś, s & š respectively in your notation above (I think).

Here is the table which I came up with:

__PS_____OSA__Arabic__Hebrew
satiated____[š]____[š]_____[s]
conceal____[s]____[s]____[s]
peace_____[ɬ]____[s]____[š]

As far as I can tell MSA has pretty much the same sound correspondances as OSA, and the Northern Semitic languages supposedly all agree with Hebrew pronunciation, yet since most don't have separate graphemes for satiated/peace I think that's impossible to know.

So it appears to me that the Semitic languages are pretty much evenly split between north and south on this issue, with Hebrew, Aramaic (and we think Akkadian, Ugaritic, Phoenician etc) pronouncing them peace=[š] and satiated=[s], whilst conceal doesn't change. The Southern Semitic languages all seem to pronounce them the reverse. This tends to suggest both pronounciations are pretty well established in various languages, and therefore there shouldn't be any reason to believe one is the assumed default over the other (that I've come across anyway).

Since Akkadian, Ugaritic and Phoenician did not distinguish satiated/peace graphemically, and they're long extinct, then it's impossible to know whether they did distinguish them phonemically (and later with niqqudim) as Hebrew does. On the other hand those languages which did distinguish them graphemically all agree with the current Arabic pronounciation.

So it would seem that entire shift postulated for Arabic was done in order to explain why Arabic is the reverse of Hebrew, when in fact it probably should be postulated the other way 'round (not that either way should be the default position to approach the issue from). There's no doubting that conceal/peace have merged in Arabic both phonemically and graphemically (because the language wasn't written down till well after the merge had occurred), whilst in Hebrew conceal/satiated have merged phonemically but not graphemically. This is probably by virtue of the fact the writing of the language preceded the merge (the opposite of Arabic).

According to the table I posted from that book above, conceal/peace merged in Arabic early on and then it supposedly flipped from [š] to [s] later on. So conceal supposedly began something like [s] then flipped to [š] and then back to [s]. Sounds like a rather bizarre explanation to me. Nevermind explaining how it supposedly flipped in all the other Southern Semitic languages also.

A simpler and more probable explanation imho would be that peace was originally [s] (as it is in Arabic and the Southern Semitic languages) and that it merged with conceal because the sounds were very similar, and satiated never changed at all. Whilst in Hebrew, a flip occurred between satiated/peace (perhaps related to the 'shibboleth phenomena') and then later on satiated and conceal merged phonemically as they are today, but remained graphemically distinct. The confusion between satiated/peace (ie. the shibboleth phenomena) is probably the reason why these two phonemes share the same grapheme in Hebrew, whilst in all other languages which distinguish between 3 phonemes, all 3 are very different from one another.

If I've messed up any of the linguistic notation stuff, please let me know so I can correct it. As I said, I get it a little confused sometimes. If there's any clear reasoning which I've neglected, please feel free to inform me.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> ...supposedly switched shin/sin in order to fit it into what is known about Hebrew and Aramaic.


And how would that fit Hebrew and Aramaic? I am not getting your point.

If we compare this reconstructed early classical Arabic with Hebrew we get:
PS...A.......H
*s: *[ʃ] - [s]
*š: *[ʃ] - [ʃ]
*ś: *[ç] - [s]

And comparing MSA with Hebrew we get
PS...A......H
*s: [s] - [s]
*š: [s] - [ʃ]
*ś: [ʃ] - [s]

I can't really see how one fits better then the other.
________________________________________________________

I think there main point is that they think Arabic Sin and Shin were less clearly distinguished in pre/early-classical times then today. When I understand their argument correctly, they say that because in adapting the Aramaic alphabet to transcribe Northern Arabic, the Samekh has consistently been ignored and the Aramaic Shin was used for both. This they assume to mean that the Arabic Sin of the time must have been palatalized (what I described as Type II [ʃ]).

The Tajwid rules for Shin, Jim and Yaa (same makhraj) aren't really consistent with the MSA pronunciation Shin=[ʃ], Jim=[gʲ]=[dʒ] and Yaa=[j] but they are consistent with the reconstructed early classical pronunciation Shin=[ç], Jim=[g] and Yaa=[j].


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## origumi

Abu Rashid said:


> hunger (for Arabic شبع and Hebrew שׂבע)


שׂבע in Hebrew is the opposite of hunger, it means satiation.


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## Abu Rashid

> שׂבע in Hebrew is the opposite of hunger, it means satiation.



Yes sorry I mixed that up, same in Arabic. Have now changed it.


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## Abu Rashid

> And how would that fit Hebrew and Aramaic? I am not getting your point.


That satiated is pronounced [š]. Therefore to explain why Arabic and all the Southern Semitic languages pronounce it the opposite you need to find evidence of a shift. I have thus far not seen the evidence, just a lot of assumptions.

Here is an example I came across today of these kinds of assumptions and the poor work that is built on them:



> Since MSA s can correspond to either Hebrew s or š, the way to determine the PS phoneme involved in a particular word is to expand the discussion to include Aramaic, Akkadian and Ugaritic. If any of these languages has the cognate with s, the PS phoneme is /s/. If, on the other hand, these languages have cognates with š, the PS phoneme is /š/.


This method is clearly flawed, since it assumes that the PS phoneme is completely dependant on the North Semitic languages for a start. We could apply an equal bias from the "Southern side" and state that if the same word has cognates in Arabic, Ge'ez and Sabaic with s, then the PS phoneme is /s/. Both methods are inherently flawed.



> If we compare this reconstructed early classical Arabic with Hebrew we  get:


This hasn't been demonstrated to be the case. This is a theory that's forwarded to explain why Arabic is the reverse of Hebrew for these two phonemes. No evidence has yet been forwarded which proves this was the case, and all evidence suggests it is not the case.



> And comparing MSA with Hebrew we get


I assume MSA means Modern Standard Arabic here and not Modern South Arabian? Again, you make the claim Arabic [s] = PS [š] yet I don't think it's been established. Unless by š you don't necessarily mean the [sh] sound.



> The Tajwid rules for Shin, Jim and Yaa (same makhraj) aren't really  consistent with the MSA pronunciation Shin=[ʃ], Jim=[gʲ]=[dʒ] and  Yaa=[j] but they are consistent with the reconstructed early classical  pronunciation Shin=[ç], Jim=[g] and Yaa=[j].


I don't see how jim and yaa have crept into this. Try to stick only to sin, shin, samekh (and perhaps thaa) if you can. It's only confusing it otherwise.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Again, you make the claim Arabic [s] = PS [š] yet I don't think it's been established. Unless by š you don't necessarily mean the [sh] sound.


I didn't claim anything of the sort. I told you that the precise PS sound values of *s, *š and *ś are unknown. Please take them just as labels. When I mean actual sounds, I use IPA.


Abu Rashid said:


> I don't see how jim and yaa have crept into this. Try to stick only to sin, shin, samekh (and perhaps thaa) if you can. It's only confusing it otherwise.


Besides the argument with the Greek transcriptions (Shin=Chi), this is their main point for the reconstruction of Shin as [ç]. I re-stated it twice with my own words. Let me try it again (this time with a wee bit of exaggeration to show the point): The Modern Standard Arabic pronunciations of Shin, Jim and Yaa do *not* have the same point of articulation (=makhraj), yet the traditional tajwid rules state they have. On the other hand the proposed pre-/early-classical pronunciations (Shin=[ç], Jim=[g] and Yaa=[j]) *do* have the same point of articulation. So, *either* the tajwid rules are wrong *or *they reflect a pronunciation different from the modern one.

Why do they bring in new letters? If we have contemporary descriptions of the phonetics of an ancient language this is a valuable tool to reconstruct the phonology of this language. But unfortunately, most description describe one unknown sound in relation to another unknown sound. Therefore these descriptions have to be taken like a system of equations with several unknowns. You cannot solve any equation for only one unknown. You have to solve the entire system for all unknown at the same time. Therefore, in historical phonetics, you usually don't discuss one or two letters in isolation. You can start this way but as your gather facts you the number of sounds you have to consider as well tends to increase.

Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to dissuade from looking for other theories. I'll be glad to discuss with you whatever you find. I just want you to understand the reasoning behind this reconstruction so that you'll be able to evaluate its merits and flaws. For that it is necessary that you familiarize yourself with the concepts, the reasoning and the research strategies in historical linguistics.


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## Mahaodeh

Abu Rashid said:


> It was taught, just perhaps not as systematically as it soon developed into. One thing is for sure it was a very strong impetus for the features of the Arabic script to be developed, in order to preserve the pronunciation. The dots were added to letters within the lifetime of the first or second Khalifah (Caliph) I think.


[/quote]
Second Khalifah, the earliest dotted document dates to April 643, it includes both dots for letters in black and another set of dots for tashkeel in red (current tashkeel was developed in the early 8th century - 712 or something if I recall correctly).

Grammar was documented a few decades later.

Another note about Sibawaih's issue: he was not the only linguist of his time, other contemporary linguists include Al Farahidi, An-nadhr ibn Shameel, Haruun ibn Musa An-nahawai, Al Kasaa'i, Abu Zaid Al Ansaari, Abu Ubaidu AllAh  ibn Salam, Ibn Us-sukait, Al Mubarrid and others. All these people were born in the 8th c. and died in the 9th (or late 8th like Sibawaih) and all of them are linguists. Why didn't any one of them note this "shift" or "reverse" or whatever one wants it to be called? A change that happened approx. 150 years after adding the dots to the Arabic Alphabet, after adding tashkeel, and after tajweed as well as nahw became sciences. As a matter of fact, none of them even mentioned that "Sibawaih claimed" such a shift, even though many of them did in fact quote Sibawaih in many other issues.

Could it be that only Sibawaih noticed this and documented it while absolutely nobody else (whether contemporary to Sibawaih or after him) did? And Assuming it could be, could it also be that nobody found the notes Sibawaih left behind until today - over 1000 years later?

I don't know how plausible you guys find the concept, but it still seem highly unlikely not because of phonetic or other related reasons, but because it could not have possibly passed through all those centuries without being noticed.



Abu Rashid said:


> Another point is how do we know how "shin" actually sounded in ancient Akkadian, Hebrew, Ugaritic, Aramaic etc? let alone Proto-Semitic. Is it pretty much just based on the fact that Hebrew/Aramaic speakers today pronounce it like this? (since the rest of those languages are extinct) It seems to me so far that there is a division between north and south Semitic languages on this issue. And the south (including Arabic) pronounce it [s] whilst the north pronounce it [š]. I just don't see how we can know which one was the correct Proto-Semitic pronunciation?



I would also like to know how the scholars found out what it sounded like, not that it's wrong, but out of curiosity.

A note however, I thought that Arabic is not a South Semitic language, but a Central one. Or is there no consensus about the classification?


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## berndf

Mahaodeh said:


> I would also like to know how the scholars found out what it sounded like, not that it's wrong, but out of curiosity.


I can answer part of your question, namely about Pre-Exile Hebrew (before 550BC). We know that Samekh and Sin were originally distinct and Sin was lateral. The reason for this is that Pre-Exile Hebrew/Early Aramaic Sin becomes "l" in other languages. E.g. the _Chaldeans_ are called _Kasdim_ (with Sin) in Hebrew and _kasdajja_ in Imperial Aramaic. In late Pre-Exile Hebrew Samekh and Sin must already have merged because we notice spelling changes from Sin to Samekh.

Concerning the realization of Samekh and Shin in early Hebrew, we know little. We have even reason to believe that it differed among various Hebrew dialects (e.g. through the famous "Shibboleth" story).


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## Abu Rashid

berndf,



> I didn't claim anything of the sort. I told you that the precise PS  sound values of *s, *š and *ś are unknown. Please take them just as  labels. When I mean actual sounds, I use IPA.


As I said: "Unless by š you don't necessarily mean the [sh] sound."

Anyway I think it's quite obvious, in every single linguistics article that I've read on the issue, the assumption is peace is pronounced [š].



> Besides the argument with the Greek transcriptions (Shin=Chi), this is  their main point for the reconstruction of Shin as [ç].


But didn't the Greeks always transliterate Biblical Hebrew names that contain peace with sigma? Why would they do that if they have a letter that sounds more like [š]?

Personally I think relying on borrowings (especially in ancient times) is pretty shoddy work. Seeing how messed up words get when borrowed between languages makes it quite obvious that using such a process as the basis for reconstructing a language is very shaky ground.

And in fact this process seems to be the reason behind the table I posted earlier where it was claimed peace in Arabic was [š] then changed to [s]. They used as the basis of their claim the fact that the Aramaic deity Ba3al Shamin was transliterated into Ancient North Arabian using their letter for peace and not their letter for satiated. And therefore their letter for peace must've been [š]. When in fact I think it would've just been obvious to them the meaning of this name was heavens/skies, and so they more translated the word, rather than transliterated it. It was then suggested that because of this fact, therefore Arabic up till the 9th. century must've pronounced peace as [š] also.

When it seems quite clear to me that the Ancient North Arabians, who were using a South Arabian derived alphabet obviously had clear and distinct graphemes for peace and satiated (and in one dialect at least for conceal as well), and that the grapheme for peace clearly matches the OSA (and all other southern Semitic languages) one which is pronounced as [s].

Another interesting point is that the OSA grapheme for satiated is clearly linked to the North Semitic grapheme shin/sin (having three 'teeth'), whilst the OSA grapheme for peace is clearly different. Which would further suggest any Northern Semitic languages which pronounced peace as [š] probably had confused the phonemes and hence the use of the same grapheme, whilst in the Southern Semitic languages they always remained clear and distinct. Also note that like Arabic, Sabaic in it's later period began to merge peace and conceal, indicating that it's a much more natural phenomena for this to occur, and that peace and conceal were always much closer in sound in Arabic than conceal and satiated (which merged in Hebrew).



> So, *either* the tajwid rules are wrong *or *they reflect a  pronunciation different from the modern one.


I'm interested where you got this from. I've studied tajweed to some extent, and have never come across this claim. What is the basis of this and who made such claims?



> Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to dissuade from looking for other  theories. I'll be glad to discuss with you whatever you find.


Well I think so far I've come across a substantial amount of evidence for why the postulation of a shift in Arabic is less likely than for one in Hebrew. I'm interested to hear if you have any explanation for why all of the Southern Semitic languages pronounce peace as [s] and all of them (including ANA, which is not considered Southern Semitic at all) distinguish graphemically between peace and satiated and that their grapheme for satiated is actually the one which appears more similar to Northern Semitic shin/sin. Because without such an explanation, the idea of the shift in Arabic is sort of going the long way 'round. It seems much more obvious that a shift in Hebrew occurred.

Can't you see how the peace=[š] view would need to make everything else fit around Hebrew? When the peace=[s] view does not, and that the vast majority of surviving Semitic languages support this view, not the former. Not that this proves it, but it certainly doesn't make the opposite view the default, as seems to be the popular view promoted.



> I just want you to understand the reasoning behind this reconstruction  so that you'll be able to evaluate its merits and flaws.


The evidence i've seen so far for the reconstruction isn't very convincing. I think I understand the supposed processes involved, I just find them highly unlikely, and in the face of much simpler and more logical processes occurring in Hebrew, I think it's just like going all the way 'round the world to get a few metres to the rear, or using your right hand to scratch your left ear, so to speak (over the head).



> For that it is necessary that you familiarize yourself with the  concepts, the reasoning and the research strategies in historical  linguistics.


I think I have a much better understanding of the situation of these phonemes/graphemes now than I did when I opened the thread, and I thank you for facilitating that.


----------



## Abu Rashid

Maha,



> Second Khalifah, the earliest dotted document dates to April 643, it  includes both dots for letters in black and another set of dots for  tashkeel in red (current tashkeel was developed in the early 8th century  - 712 or something if I recall correctly).



Shukran, I didn't know that much was done so early on.



> Could it be that only Sibawaih noticed this and documented it while  absolutely nobody else



Actually Sibawayh didn't even notice any shift at all. What they claim is that Sibawayh supposedly described sin/shin in a way which is different to their pronounciation today, they don't claim he noticed a shift. According to them, at the time of Sibawayh's death, he would've been pronouncing ش as س and س as ش. Therefore sometime after Sibawayh's death (ie. probably in the 9th. century) a shift must've occurred. In my view this is a very weak case on which to make such a claim.



> I don't know how plausible you guys find the concept, but it still seem  highly unlikely not because of phonetic or other related reasons, but  because it could not have possibly passed through all those centuries  without being noticed.



Nor could it possibly have occurred simultaneously in all the vast distant lands that Arabic was already being used in this time.

Also another point is that there's plenty of evidence of other sound shifts in Arabic, like ث -> ت (eg. thalathah -> talata) and ذ -> ز (eg. madhhab -> mazhab) but they only ever seem to effect colloquial, never fus7a. This shows that fus7a was very well guarded phonologically from any sound shifts which were occurring due to wearing the sounds down by speakers, at least from the onset of the Islamic period when it was frozen, and perhaps before.



> A note however, I thought that Arabic is not a South Semitic language,  but a Central one. Or is there no consensus about the classification?



Well there has been a lot of debate about this, but I think Arabic is now considered more Northern than Southern (or as you said Central). what i meant was that all the Southern Semitic languages AS WELL AS Arabic (whether it's Southern or not) have the opposite pronunciation to Hebrew. So making this theory to explain why Arabic is the opposite of Hebrew for sin/shin doesn't explain it for the dozens of other Southern Semitic languages. which would tend to suggest the Arabic pronounciation is mch more common to Semitic languages than the Hebrew pronunciation. And in my opinion, it's always been assumed the other way 'round because Western scholars are mostly coming from a Hebra-centric position, rather than based on the obvious facts.

They may one day look at it from the other angle and find it's a lot more plausible, but for now it seems they've locked themselves into that assumption, and now they just need to spend a lot of time proving how each and every Southern Semitic language supposedly shifted, as they think they've done with Arabic.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> But didn't the Greeks always transliterate Biblical Hebrew names that contain peace with sigma? Why would they do that if they have a letter that sounds more like [š]?


The argument is about the transcription of ش in early classical Arabic times. The pronunciation of the etymologically corresponding Hebrew letter שׂ was obviously different at the same time.



Abu Rashid said:


> I'm interested where you got this from. I've studied tajweed to some extent, and have never come across this claim. What is the basis of this and who made such claims?


Page 131, first line: "a point of closure 'same as for g and y...'". I sensed that you didn't catch the logical implications of this few words, so I stated them explicitly.


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## Abu Rashid

> The argument is about the transcription of ش in  early classical Arabic times. The pronunciation of the etymologically  corresponding Hebrew letter שׂ was obviously different at the same time.


My point was that if Hebrew שׁ was transliterated into Greek as sigma, when a Greek letter exists which represents more of a [š] sound, then it tends to be even more of an indication that Hebrew has reversed the sounds of these two phonemes.

But as I said, I personally think all this reliance on other languages' borrowings is like building a house on quicksand. Because for a start it assumes the phonemes didn't shift in the other language as well, and secondly borrowings are often very skewed. Someone earlier on mentioned borrowings into Portuguese, and I've gotta say whenever I come across a Spanish/Portuguese borrowing from Arabic I just think to myself "How on earth did they end up with that??".



> Page 131, first line: "a point of closure 'same as for g and y...'". I  sensed that you didn't catch the logical implications of this few words,  so I stated them explicitly.


As far as I'm aware the rules of tajweed and makhraj teach to pronounce exactly as the letters are pronounced in Fus7a today, and have always done so, since the revelation of the Qur'an.

The theory expressed in the book I quoted just seems fanciful to me. And the idea that the borrowing from Aramaic of "Ba3al Shamin" into ANA (not even into Arabic) proves Arabic pronounced the letter sin (called "sat" in ANA/OSA) as [š] just doesn't fit any of the facts at all. It appears to be nothing but a folly motivated by a desire to show why Arabic does not agree with Hebrew on the phonemes for the letters sin/shin. It would be better if they started work on explaining why OSA, the only Semitic language with 3 clear and separate graphemes for these phonemes, doesn't agree with Hebrew. Perhaps a 'postulated shift/reversal' in OSA would shed more light on the issue.

Also I'd still like to know which "South Arabian" language you listed as agreeing with Hebrew in your table. It appears OSA and MSA languages all agree with Arabic (for sin/shin).


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> My point was that if Hebrew שׁ was transliterated into Greek as sigma, when a Greek letter exists which represents more of a [š] sound, then it tends to be even more of an indication that Hebrew has reversed the sounds of these two phonemes.


No you cannot deduce anything of the sort. Greeks hear no difference between "s" and "sh". It is the same sound to them, both are Sigmas. But they can distinguish the Sigma from [ç] which since Byzantine times is one of the two variant pronunciations of the letter Chi. That is why Greek transliterations can't tell us anything about "s" vs. "sh" but it can tell us something about a possible [ç] sound.

This is even true with modern Greek. Once a Geek tourist asked me for directions to "Unterschleißheim" (a suburb of Munich). The name contains both the "s" (spelled "ß") and the "sh" sound (spelled "sch"). She tried to pronounce the name a dozen times but confused the the two sounds in all possible ways.

Talking of the Greek alphabet: The Samekh became Xi in Greek. Some people regard this as an indication of a plosive component it the original Samekh, maybe [ts]. I noted this as a possible PS origin of Semekh in post #2. If you reconstruct it this way then it makes more sense to reconstruct the PS origin of Hebrew Shin as [s] rather than [ʃ]. In this case, Arabic Sin would ultimately be a merger of [ts] and [s].


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## mugibil

Abu Rashid said:


> Ok, here's the conclusions I've come to from examining OSA (and also MSA) which as far as I can tell are the only Semitic languages which have 3 clear and separate graphemes for each of the 3 different postulated Proto-Semitic sounds.
> ...
> So they are satiated (for Arabic شبع and Hebrew שׂבע), conceal (for Arabic ستر and Hebrew סתר) and peace (for Arabic سلم and Hebrew שׁלם) *ś, s & š respectively in your notation above (I think).
> 
> Here is the table which I came up with:
> 
> __PS_____OSA__Arabic__Hebrew
> satiated____[š]____[š]_____[s]
> conceal____[s]____[s]____[s]
> peace_____[ɬ]____[s]____[š]
> 
> As far as I can tell MSA has pretty much the same sound correspondances as OSA, and the Northern Semitic languages supposedly all agree with Hebrew pronunciation, yet since most don't have separate graphemes for satiated/peace I think that's impossible to know.



I see berntf has abandoned the discussion, and I don't want to spend a lot of time on this, but I think things have become so confused that some clarifications are in order. I'll try to show you that the traditional assumption about the pronunciation of the reconstructed Proto-Semitic phonemes is not due to alleged academic Hebrew-centrism but is merely the simplest and most natural one. Because you seem to be unhappy about the prejudicing effect of the use of *s,*š and *ś as conventional, non-phonetic signs, I will use your terminology: "the _conceal_ phoneme" (*s), "the _peace_ phoneme" (*š), and "the _satiated_ phoneme" (*ś). When I mean phonetic value, I'll use slashes (//). So - here it is, in three simple steps. 

1. Since the "conceal" phoneme gives /s/ in both Hebrew and Arabic, the most natural conclusion is that the "conceal" phoneme was a /s/ already in Proto-Semitic. 

2. Since we know that the "peace" phoneme was somehow distinct from the "conceal" phoneme in Proto-Semitic, the most natural conclusion is that the Arabic pronunciation of the "peace" phoneme as /s/ can't have been used in Proto-Semitic (because if it had been /s/, it would have coincided with the "conceal" phoneme).

3. If the Arabic pronunciation of the "peace" phoneme is not the original one, the next natural possibility to be considered is that the Hebrew pronunciation is the original one. Hebrew has /ʃ/ for the "peace" phoneme. Assuming that this pronunciation was also used in Proto-Semitic doesn't lead to its coinciding with any other phoneme. So the most natural conclusion is that the "peace" phoneme was a /ʃ/ in Proto-Semitic.

This is not certain, it's just the simplest possible theory, the one that fits the facts in the simplest way, without resorting to Old South Arabian and Modern South Arabian at all. The place where you would disagree is Step 3: since /ʃ/ is the "satiated" phoneme in Arabic, and you assume that this was the same in Proto-Semitic, you regard this as a coincidence of two phonemes as well. Note that unlike the reconstruction of *s as /s/, this assumption about Proto-Semitic is based on only one of the two languages, and you choose to ignore all the various evidence for the "satiated" phoneme having been originally a lateral /ɬ/, the many cases in which it alternates with /l/ (in related roots as well as loanwords) etc. So if neither the Arabic nor the Hebrew pronunciation of "peace" is the original one, the question remains which one is. The only remaining pronunciation at hand is /ɬ/, so you choose that. 

The only justification for this choice is the alleged pronunciation of Old South Arabian, which you say has /ɬ/ for the "peace" phoneme. OSA is more obscure and poorly attested than any North Semitic language, and the reconstruction of its pronunciation is completely dependent on other languages, but "as far as you can tell", its reconstructed pronunciation is also that of Modern South Arabian. This allows you to conclude that instead of (orthographic) Hebrew having two phonetic preservations and one change vs Arabic having one preservation and two changes, it's the other way round. And South Arabian, Old and Modern, is equal to Proto-Semitic sibilant-wise. The problem is that precisely your description of the Proto-Semitic reflexes observed in Old and Modern South Arabian seems to be very inaccurate.

This is what we get when we look at both wiktionary and this http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?root=config&morpho=0&basename=%5Cdata%5Csemham%5Csemet&first=1. Even Wiktionary, which you cite, gives slm and not ɬlm for "peace". Not only the Wikipedia table of Proto-Semitic reflexes, but also standard works such as Bennett's "Comparative semitic linguistics: a manual" give Modern South Arabic correspondences as identical to reconstructed Hebrew and Proto-Semitic. While reflexes in MSA seem to vary a lot more than suggested by those tables when one looks at actual words, one thing is certain: they definitely don't have /ɬ/ for the "peace" phoneme. Sometimes /s/, as in Mehri selo:m, sometimes /š/, but definitely not /ɬ/. And it appears that according to most linguists, far from alleged academic Hebrew-centrism having influenced the reconstruction of Proto-Semitic, academic Arabo-centrism has influenced the reconstruction of Old South Arabic. In my next post, I quote _The Semitic languages_ (ed. R.Hetzron), p.222-223 where this issue is described in detail:


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## mugibil

> One of the most acute problems of Sayhadic phonology is that of non-emphatic unvoiced sibilants, transcribed here as s1, s2 and s3. Traditional Sabeology was deeply influenced by Arabic studies and believed that Sayhadic was especially close to Classical Arabic. Accordingly, these graphemes received the phonetic value observed in the corresponding Arabic cognates. Thus, s1lm 'peace' was transcribed as slm because of Arabic sala:m and s2ʿb 'tribe, commune' as šʿb because of Arabic šaʿb-. Since Arabic has no third unvoiced sibilant, s3 was conventionally transcribed ś; most scholars thought it to have had a phonetic value close to š (our s2), but even a lateralized articulation was sometimes proposed.
> Nowdays, most scholars think that there is no special relationship between Sayhadic and North Arabian dialects. At the same time, the system described above obviously contradicts the data of those languages which do have three unvoiced sibilants, namely Hebrew and Modern South Arabian (MSA):
> 
> Sayhadic     Hebrew   MSA
> s1             š         š
> s2             ś         ś
> s3             s         s
> Examples: Sayh. dbs1 'honey' - Heb. dəbaš, Jibb:a:li dɛbš; Sayh. s2bʿ 'anundant, abundantly' - Heb., Mehri śbʿ 'to be satiated'; Sayh. ’s3r 'to be bound with an obligation' - Hebrew ’sr 'to tie', Jibba:li ’sr 'to hobble an animal'. Though some sporadic exceptions should not be neglected (see, e.g. Sayh. ʿs3y 'to do, make', which is obviously to be compared with Hebrew ʿśh), in the great majority of cases these correspondences are valid, and this is the notation that we shall follow in our chapter."



Even if one recognizes that MSAn's reflexes appear rather inconsistent and that there are cases where MSAn agrees with Arabic and not with Hebrew, the fact remains that neither OSAn not MSAn give any reasonable alternative for the reconstruction of the contrast between the "peace" phoneme and the "satiated" phoneme.


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## mugibil

Abu Rashid said:


> It's relying purely on their interpretation of how Sibawayh described a sound, yet no other linguist for 1300 years noticed this until now.


Your enormous skepticism of contemporary linguistics seems to be matched only by your enormous trust of religious linguistic tradition (though not if the traditional literature itself suggests that a change has occurred, as in the case of Sibawayh). Anyway, Lipinsky ("Semitic languages: outline of a comparative grammar"), Hetzron et al ("The Semitic languages"), Watson ("The phonology and morphology of Arabic") and Bennett ("Comparative semitic linguistics: a manual") have already been cited, all contain generalizations about cognates and examples of cognates that don't fit in your theory. If you want to gather empirical evidence about cognates on your own, this http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/re...y=&method_any=substring&sort=number&ic_any=on database; you can get the hang of the search tool if you try. I won't post here again for quite some time, these posts took too long to write.


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## berndf

berndf said:


> Let me recapitulate, and please do me a favour and read it carefully. This table compares reconstructed Proto-Semitic (PS) and dead Phoenician with three living Languages. For the living languages I also noted the current sound values.
> 
> PS..Phoenician..Hebrew........Arabic.......South Arabian
> s1 .Samekh......[s] - Samekh..[s] - Sin....[s]
> s2                   .Shin........[ʃ] - Shin.....[s] - Sin....[ʃ]/
> s3  .Shin........[s] - Sin.....[ʃ] - Shin....[ɬ]
> 
> As you can see the situation is much more complex than a simple "reversal".


Rereading this thread I recognized a mix-up in this post concerning the s1, s2, s3 notation. It should be like this, of course:

PS..Phoenician..Hebrew........Arabic.......Modern South Arabian
s3 .Samekh......[s] - Samekh..[s] - Sin....[s]
s1                   .Shin........[ʃ] - Shin....[s] - Sin....[ʃ]/
s2  .Shin........[s] - Sin.....[ʃ] - Shin...[ɬ]

Sorry for the confusion.


I found here a source arguing (starting p.312) in favour of the the theory that PS s1 was /s/ and that s1 and s3 exchanged their sound values in Canaanite. Let me stress again that this would *not *mean that Arabic remained unchanged. Arabic Sin is etymological both s1 and s3. Whatever there original sound values were, at least one must have changed to produce the modern Sin. And the Arabic Shin is etymologically s2 which was almost certainly not [ʃ].


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## Abu Rashid

mungu,

I will give a full reply to your posts when I get more of a chance.

But I just wanted to point out something about your link.

The link you gave to the Semitic roots database shows not just MSA, but also all of the various South Semitic languages, Ge'ez, Amharic, Tigre, Gurage etc. all agreeing with Arabic on the pronunciation of 'peace' as /s/. And most of these languages are living and therefore we know how they're pronounced (today at least). Most of these languages also use an abjad derived from the OSA abjad (the Musnad) and they use the same symbol for 'peace' as OSA used (��), and they pronounce it /s/. Also another point is that the OSA letter s2 (��) seems to resemble more the shin (��/ש) of the Phoenician/Aramaic derived alphabets, not s1 (��), which doesn't necessarily tell us anything concrete on it's own, but it's still interesting nonetheless. One would think if the sound of OSA s1 was /ʃ/, then they wouldn't have borrowed it to represent /s/ in their languages, and the same for s2 they wouldn't have borrowed to represent /ʃ/ in their languages. This creates a major problem for your claims. and this also gives us the only concrete evidence about the prononciation of OSA phonemes.

So as I stated earlier, if Arabic has made the transitions that have been proposed, then so too must have all those languages.

I'd be very interested to know what evidence there is that Akkadian, Phoencian, Ugaritic etc. all agree with Hebrew on this as well. Because since they are all long extinct languages, there's about as much chance of guessing their phonemes correctly as there is of OSA, unelss there's some other quite convincing evidence otherwise.

Note: Seems this forum doesn't have support for latest unicode standards which handle both OSA and Phoenician characters. Kind of disappointing for a forum focused on language


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> One would think if the sound of OSA s1 was /ʃ/, then they wouldn't have borrowed it to represent /s/ in their languages, and the same for s2 they wouldn't have borrowed to represent /ʃ/ in their languages. This creates a major problem for your claims. and this also gives us the only concrete evidence about the prononciation of OSA phonemes.


I am not sure where you got this from but Sabaean s2 having been realized as /ʃ/ is more than unlikely.

Maybe you found somewhere s2 represented as <š>. The transcription conventions for OSA are inconsistent. Some authors use <s> and <š> to denote the etymological equivalents in Hebrew, some authors to denote  the etymological equivalents in Arabic (see e.g. here). Neither of this should be taken to mean that Sabaean s2 was actually /ʃ/. The candidates for /s/ and /ʃ/ are s1 and s3 but not s2. There is not a shadow of a doubt that there were sound shifts from PS to Arabic. Must have been because s1 and s3 are merged in Arabic. The only question is which of them was originally /s/, s3 (as in Hebrew) or rather s1? Different scholars argue different cases here. But I never read a linguistic argument in favour of s2=/ʃ/.


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## Abu Rashid

> I am not sure where you got this from but Sabaean s2 having been  realized as /ʃ/ is more than unlikely.



Why do you say that? what facts and evidence supposedly suggest that? All modern languages which use scripts descended from the Sabaean abjad have 'sat' (s1) as /s/ and 'shin' (s2) as /ʃ/. From the evidence I can see, all of it points to s1=/s/ and s2=/ʃ/. Please detail what evidence you think points to s1=/ʃ/.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Please detail what evidence you think points to s1=/ʃ/.


I never said s1 was /ʃ/. On the contrary, I gave you a source for s3=/ʃ/ and s1=/s/, yesterday. I personally have no opinion concerning the two theories s1=/ʃ/ and s3=/s/ or s3=/ʃ/ and s1=/s/.



Abu Rashid said:


> Why do you say that? what facts and evidence  supposedly suggest that?


All quotes I presented throughout this thread give s2 as different from both /s/ and /ʃ/. Only the reference I gave in #90 postulates a merger s2,s3>/ʃ/ in Ge'ez... Ge'ez, not OSA. The Ge'ez script is by any large a variant of Sabaean but differs in a crucial point, it lost the OSA letter for s3 and uses the Swat which is derived from OSA s2 to denote both, s2 and s3. OSA had three different graphemes... and three different phonemes.

What is then your own opinion? I am at a loss. Do you think PS s2 was /ʃ/? I really haven't found a single source claiming that. You obviously also think s1=/s/ which many authors believe too. But what would then s3 have been?

EDIT: Rereading the last posts I found this:





Abu Rashid said:


> Also another point is that the OSA letter s2  (��) seems to resemble more the shin (��/ש) of the Phoenician/Aramaic  derived alphabets, not s1 (��)...


I can't make head or tail of what you are writing here. You have to explain this to me. Phoenician/Aramaic had only one letter for s1 and s2, namely ש. How could the OSA s2 be closer to one letter than to the same letter.


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## mugibil

Hi, I didn't intend to post here soon, but I remembered an additional argument that I had forgotten to post, so I'll answer to this here as well.


Abu Rashid said:


> The link you gave to the Semitic roots database shows not just MSA, but also all of the various South Semitic languages, Ge'ez, Amharic, Tigre, Gurage etc. all agreeing with Arabic on the pronunciation of 'peace' as /s/.


As for MSAn, you're wrong. Specifically the word "peace" isn't given a cognate in MSAn, only in OSAn. For other words with that phoneme (and with the other phonemes concerned), the MSAn languages seem to sometimes agree with reconstructed Proto-Semitic and Hebrew and sometimes with Arabic, as I already said. Examples of "peace" phonemes agreeing with Hebrew in Jibbali: Jibbali šum for Lebanese ʔǝsǝm, Hebrew šēm, Jibbali šnin for Arabic sinn-, Hebrew šēn, Jibbali šɛ̃n for Arabic samn-, Hebrew šämän, Jibbali šh_ɔ́t for Hebrew šäḥī, etc. etc. On the other hand, there are also examples such as Jibbali skun for Arabic: skn, Hebrew: škn, Jibbali: sɛ̄l for Arabic: sāll-, Hebrew: šǝʔōl. Since the deviations from the generalization asserted in linguistic works may be due to factors that I don't know, not being a specialist - other phonological processes, loans etc. - I think I'm justified in sticking with the accepted view. Especially since the results don't seem to suggest any alternative view either (certainly not the theory you proposed). BTW, even if MSAn did _consistently_ have /s/ for the "peace" phoneme (which it doesn't, AFAICS), this would only prove that they have merged it with the "conceal" phoneme into /s/ like Arabic and the rest (and are only more archaic with respect to the preservation of the voiceless lateral for the "satiated" phoneme) - i.e. it would only prove that they don't represent the original condition in this respect, and wouldn't imply anything as to the original condition being different from what is otherwise assumed. 

You raised a more general question. If Arabic and all those other southern languages have /s/ for the "peace" phoneme, why assume that the Hebrew and Aramaic pronunciation of the "peace" phoneme is the original one? Well one reason is that Hebrew and Aramaic are the only surviving languages that have kept that phoneme separate from all the other sibilants (abstracting from MSAn). That is, they haven't merged it. Arabic and all the Southern languages have clearly merged the "peace" phoneme with the "conceal" phoneme, and since the "conceal" phoneme is believed to have been /s/, that could have determined the pronunciation of the "peace" phoneme as well. For that matter, most of the Ethiopic languages have merged _all_ three sibilants into a /s/ (the lateral pronunciation of "satiate" shown in Wikipedia for Ge'ez is a reconstruction, we can only see that the letter is different). And Tigre, according to the "Comparative semitic linguistics", has a variation between /s/ and /ʃ/ for all three. Such languages have clearly changed so much that it's not surprising if they haven't attracted a lot of attention from comparativists as evidence for the original sound of the sibilants.



Abu Rashid said:


> I'd be very interested to know what evidence there is that Akkadian, Phoencian, Ugaritic etc. all agree with Hebrew on this as well.


I can't answer to this outright, as I'm not really a scholar of the Ancient Near East. But the obvious thing is that the Hebrew alphabet was taken from Phoenician (Canaanite in general), so it was presumably used for the same sounds in the same way (except when the sound was absent in Phoenician, as in the case of the "satiate" phoneme). Modern Aramaic agrees with Hebrew. Akkadian is another story.



Abu Rashid said:


> This creates a major problem for your claims.


You shouldn't call them "my claims", they are the generally accepted, conventional view in the field, as all the sources given so far show (including the one added by berndf, which contains an attempt to disprove this generally accepted view and propose that the "peace" phoneme was /s/; BTW, it seems to suggest a really weird _reversal _- not a shift but truly a reversal - in Hebrew/Aramaic). You are the one trying to develop your own alternative theory.

As for the details of the history of the OSAn script and its successors, I would really need to examine them a lot if I am to discuss it and I just don't have the time at present. But as for the borrowing OSA-to-OtherSoutherners, it could have been influenced by the merger that had occurred in the OtherSoutherners, as berndf already pointed out; and as for borrowing ProtoCanaanite-to-OSA, it could have been influenced by the merger that had occurred in ProtoCanaanite (for example, since Canaanite shin could designate either the "peace" phoneme or the "satiated" phoneme, it could have been borrowed for either one or the other in OSA). So it seems hard to draw conclusions from this. Anyway, I hope I've showed that the conventional reconstruction, correct or incorrect, is not due to Hebrew-centric bias as you suggested, but rather it was quite natural and logical for it to develop; it is the simplest assumption, as shown in the three steps I outlined above. It wasn't meant specifically to "explain away" why Arabic and Ethiopic are different, and it probably would have developed in the same way if Arabic and Ethiopic didn't exist at all. I'm sorry I don't know when it was originally established in its present form.

BTW:



Abu Rashid said:


> As far as I'm aware the rules of tajweed and makhraj teach to pronounce exactly as the letters are pronounced in Fus7a today, and have always done so, since the revelation of the Qur'an.



I'm not sure how general this statement is meant to be, but as I've been under the impression that you always tend to oppose any suggestion of change or inconsistency in Classical Arabic, especially after the appearance of the Qur'an, you can take a look at the "The phonology and morphology of Arabic" and some of the other books cited earlier to see a lot of cases where the pronunciation is generally considered to have changed since then. One simple example which I remember and which berndf has already alluded to several times is that it just doesn't make sense phonologically to have different sun-moon status for šīn and ǧīm: they have the same place and active organ of articulation and either both should trigger assimilation of lām or neither should; so either one or the other must have changed since the rule was fixed.

Now pardon me, but I'm really withdrawing from the discussion for a long time; I just can't afford to spend so much time writing posts.


----------



## Abu Rashid

mungu,



> I see berntf has abandoned the discussion



Actually berndf made the last post before yours, and didn't indicate he was abandoning the discussion 

I just haven't had as much time to devote to researching this issue as it requires, so haven't been looking into it as much.

We did continue the discussion (or one aspect of it) in private, and I will mention something about that a little further down.



> and I don't want to spend a lot of time on this



Please don't feel obligated to reply to my post.



> I will use your terminology: "the _conceal_ phoneme" (*s), "the _peace_  phoneme" (*š), and "the _satiated_ phoneme" (*ś).



Thank you. I think it really helps to keep it all clear, for me anyway.



> 1. Since the "conceal" phoneme gives /s/ in both Hebrew and Arabic, the  most natural conclusion is that the "conceal" phoneme was a /s/ already  in Proto-Semitic.



This would seem like a logical conclusion to draw. However, what I'd suggest is that we recognise that two phonemes were fairly close, enough that in most languages they seem to have merged, both of them having sounds similar to /s/. And this is where I think the first piece of evidence of the Hebrew reversal of sin/shin becomes apparent.

In Biblical Hebrew, there seems to be a few examples of 'peace' and 'conceal' being confused with one another, we have the example mentioned above כנס (kanas) in Hebrew, cognate with כנש (kanosh) in Aramaic, and we have שבא (sheba) and סבא (seba) which both seem refer to "a nation in the south", most likely Saba in Southern Arabia.

For this confusion to have occurred, 'peace' in ancient times must've been more like 'conceal' in Hebrew, and so they began to be confused, but never enough that they ended up merging. Now if a reversal of 'peace' and 'satiated' occurred in Hebrew between the time of Biblical Hebrew and the Christian period (at which point Hebrew orthography became fixed due to it's importance as a liturgical language), that would explain why after this time it is 'satiated' and 'conceal' that became confused and ended up merging phonetically, but since the orthography was now fixed they didn't merge graphemically. Whilst in Arabic 'peace' and 'conceal' merged phonetically before orthography was fixed, and so they are phonetically and graphemically merged.

This makes much more sense than the theory that 'peace' and 'conceal' merged in Arabic as /š/ and then later shifted to /s/, since if we accept 'conceal' was originally /s/ then it would not be likely to merge with /š/, and it makes no sense for 'conceal' to flip flop from /s/ to /š/ and back to /s/ again.



> 2. Since we know that the "peace" phoneme was somehow distinct from the  "conceal" phoneme in Proto-Semitic, the most natural conclusion is that  the Arabic pronunciation of the "peace" phoneme as /s/ can't have been  used in Proto-Semitic (because if it had been /s/, it would have  coincided with the "conceal" phoneme)



Whilst I agree it's unlikely they were the same, I'd say it's obvious they were similar, and that's why they've ended up merging in pretty much every Semitic language that's still living. The sin/shin reversal in Hebrew explaining why that merge occurred between 'satiated' and 'conceal' instead of between 'peace' and 'conceal', apart from the confusions (i just mentioned) which must've occurred very early on in Hebrew, before the reversal.



> 3. If the Arabic pronunciation of the "peace" phoneme is not the  original one, the next natural possibility to be considered is that the  Hebrew pronunciation is the original one. Hebrew has /ʃ/ for the "peace"  phoneme. Assuming that this pronunciation was also used in  Proto-Semitic doesn't lead to its coinciding with any other phoneme. So  the most natural conclusion is that the "peace" phoneme was a /ʃ/ in  Proto-Semitic.



Not if we consider the mergers with 'conceal'. The only way i can see this properly being explained is if Hebrew reversed 'peace' and 'satiated'.



> While reflexes in MSA seem to vary a lot more than suggested by those  tables when one looks at actual words, one thing is certain: they  definitely don't have /ɬ/ for the "peace" phoneme. Sometimes /s/, as in  Mehri selo:m, sometimes /š/, but definitely not /ɬ/.



Well as I said I was only guessing about MSA, don't really know much about it.



> And it appears that according to most linguists, far from alleged  academic Hebrew-centrism having influenced the reconstruction of  Proto-Semitic, academic Arabo-centrism has influenced the reconstruction  of Old South Arabic.



When reconstructing an extinct language, you've got no choice but to rely on comparisons with those languages closest to it. There's no doubting there's a lot of similarities between OSA and Arabic, also a lot of differences too. I don't think you could really class this as Arabo-centrism. If so, then the entire work done on reconstruction of the extinct Northern Semitic languages would also be a case of Hebra-centrism. This wasn't my point.


----------



## Abu Rashid

mungu,



> Even if one recognizes that MSAn's reflexes appear rather inconsistent  and that there are cases where MSAn agrees with Arabic and not with  Hebrew



As i said, I don't know anything about MSA, and it could well be that it's been influenced heavily by Arabic anyway, since it's existed in small islands in a sea of Arabic for all of it's known history. That could account for why some roots agree with the South, whilst others with the North. But that isn't the decider anyway, you still have the entire Southern family to contend with, which all exhibit the same pronunciation as Arabic. As I said, this seems to be a show off between two living languages in the North and a lot of extinct languages on one side, and a lot of living languages in the south and a few extinct ones. Given such circumstances, I think the case would have to be stronger for 'peace'=/s/ and 'satiated'=/š/, for the moment anyway. Nothing is set in stone. 



> Your enormous skepticism of contemporary linguistics seems to be matched  only by your enormous trust of religious linguistic tradition (though  not if the traditional literature itself suggests that a change has  occurred, as in the case of Sibawayh).



I'm skeptical of everything, that's the only way to find the facts. As I said earlier, the religious aspects of Tajweed and the Huffaz are not relevant to this discussion, so please leave them out, they do not detract from the relevance of these points at all.

Sibawayh doesn't actually say that though. It's something that modern Western scholars seem to have inferred from his writings. I have been discussing this with berndf in private and there are dictionaries from the time of Sibawayh which list words in order of their exit point (from back to front of mouth) and according to that listing, the claims made about Sibawayh appear to be wrong. They seemed rather dubious anyway, because no Arab Grammarian since the time of Sibawayh ever picked up on this supposed meaning in Sibawayh's descriptions. So it just seems like a misunderstanding about what he actually said.

So it's not a matter of me not putting trust in Sibawayh (who was purely a Grammarian btw, not a religious scholar, which makes your suggestions even more pointless), it's a matter of Sibawayh's writings being re-interpreted by modern Western scholars, and them implying something from it which is rather 'radical'.



> If you want to gather empirical evidence about cognates on your own,  this http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/res...mber&ic_any=on  database; you can get the hang of the search tool if you try. I won't  post here again for quite some time, these posts took too long to write.



Thanks, i have tried using this site before, and found it to have a rather bizarre interface.



> As for MSAn, you're wrong. Specifically the word "peace" isn't given a  cognate in MSAn, only in OSAn.



I meant 'peace' the phoneme. But anyway, as you mentioned above, it is selo:m, no? And therefore agrees with Arabic.

I meant most of the words I've found beginning with /s/ in Arabic, agree in MSA.

Here's a few examples from the first few pages I searched for:

*Arabic:* ʔins-ān
*Mehri:* ʔans
*Jibbali:* ʔɛnsí
*Soqotri:* ʔinsíyye

*Arabic:* ʔisb
*Mehri:* mǝnsōb
*Jibbali:* mɔ́sɔ̄t
*Soqotri:* mǝ́nsub

*Arabic:* sbb
*Mehri:* seb*
**Jibbali:* sebb

*Arabic:* sarīr
*Mehri:* sār
*Jibbali:* sér*
**Soqotri:* sar

*Arabic:* dḥs*
**Soqotri:* dôḥes

*Arabic:* nfs
*Mehri:* (?) šǝnfūs
*Jibbali:* ǝnfés

*Arabic:* dws
*Mehri:* dōs

*Arabic:* sinn
*Jibbali:* šnin

*Arabic:* ʕṭs
*Mehri:* ʔáwṭǝh
*Jibbali:* ʕɔṭɔš
*Soqotri:* ʕéṭoš

The last two were the only ones I found which contradict. I must admit I didn't do a very good search, because the interface just seems strange to me. Could you possibly point me in the direction of how to search all roots with the Arabic /s/ in them for instance? Is it even possible? No need to respond to my entire post to let me know how, just telling me that would be a help.



> and sometimes with Arabic



Seems a bit more than sometimes to me.



> Well one reason is that Hebrew and Aramaic are the only surviving  languages that have kept that phoneme separate from all the other  sibilants (abstracting from MSAn).



This is a very good point.



> That is, they haven't merged it. Arabic and all the Southern languages  have clearly merged the "peace" phoneme with the "conceal" phoneme, and  since the "conceal" phoneme is believed to have been /s/, that could  have determined the pronunciation of the "peace" phoneme as well.



As mentioned above, this is actually more reason to think that 'peace' and 'conceal' were more both similar to /s/ originally, hence the reason they merged. Hebrew seems to have been the same originally, but later reversed them and so 'satiated' became more like 'conceal'. Also another point is that Phoenician 'shin' became sigma when the Greek alphabet was created, which would tend to support my idea as well. Samekh became xi in Greek, which may tell us something about how they differed. Note that neither of them are close to /š/, certainly not the letter borrowed from Phoenician 'shin/sin'.



> But the obvious thing is that the Hebrew alphabet was taken from  Phoenician (Canaanite in general), so it was presumably used for the  same sounds in the same way (except when the sound was absent in  Phoenician, as in the case of the "satiate" phoneme). Modern Aramaic  agrees with Hebrew. Akkadian is another story.



But if my theory is correct, when the letters were borrowed, Hebrew would've been pronouncing 'peace' as /s/ anyway, so that would be irrelevant.

My point is that the letter for 'peace' in the Northern languages could well have been /s/, but since we only know it through Hebrew/Aramaic, we assume it was /š/.



> BTW, it seems to suggest a really weird _reversal _- not a shift  but truly a reversal - in Hebrew/Aramaic). You are the one trying to  develop your own alternative theory.



Nope, my theory is the same as what you just mentioned. A reversal in Hebrew/Aramaic.



> I'm not sure how general this statement is meant to be, but as I've been  under the impression that you always tend to oppose any suggestion of  change or inconsistency in Classical Arabic, especially after the  appearance of the Qur'an



Yes, I'm pretty convinced the phonology of Arabic hasn't changed since this time. Obviously before this time it changed slightly, with the merger of 'peace' and 'conceal', but that one singular change tends to suggest Arabic was pretty conservative phonologically otherwise.



> you can take a look at the "The phonology and morphology of Arabic" and  some of the other books cited earlier to see a lot of cases where the  pronunciation is generally considered to have changed since then.



I shall do so.



> One  simple example which I remember and which berndf has already alluded to  several times is that it just doesn't make sense phonologically to have  different sun-moon status for šīn and ǧīm: they have the same place and  active organ of articulation and either both should trigger assimilation  of lām or neither should; so either one or the other must have changed  since the rule was fixed.



Will have to look into this. It's possible 'jim' could've changed, since it exists in some regions with a varied pronunciation of 'gim'.



> Now pardon me, but I'm really withdrawing from the discussion for a long  time; I just can't afford to spend so much time writing posts.



No problem, don't feel pressured to post. Although I'd appreciate if you could at least advise me on how to search that databse for specific semitic letters.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> In Biblical Hebrew, there seems to be a few examples of 'peace' and 'conceal' being confused with one another, we have the example mentioned above כנס (kanas) in Hebrew, cognate with כנש (kanosh) in Aramaic, and we have שבא (sheba) and סבא (seba) which both seem refer to "a nation in the south", most likely Saba in Southern Arabia.
> 
> For this confusion to have occurred, 'peace' in ancient times must've been more like 'conceal' in Hebrew, and so they began to be confused, but never enough that they ended up merging. Now if a reversal of 'peace' and 'satiated' occurred in Hebrew between the time of Biblical Hebrew and the Christian period...


You have to think of Early Biblical Hebrew as emerging from a quite fragmented Canaanite dialect continuum. All kind of mergers, shifts and reversals involving these three phonemes but have occurred. The confusions you mentioned do not necessarily mean that the sounds were very close. They can be due to to large variations between dialects. (Think of the _Shibboleth_ example.)



Abu Rashid said:


> ... that would explain why after this time it is 'satiated' and 'conceal' that became confused and ended up merging phonetically, but since the orthography was now fixed they didn't merge graphemically.


Merged but not confused. This probably happend much later than the Samekh/Shin mix-ups in early Biblical Hebrew and the two developments were unrelated.



Abu Rashid said:


> This makes much more sense than the theory that 'peace' and 'conceal' merged in Arabic as /š/ and then later shifted to /s/, since if we accept 'conceal' was originally /s/ then it would not be likely to merge with /š/, and it makes no sense for 'conceal' to flip flop from /s/ to /š/ and back to /s/ again.


I read this a dozen times but still cannot understand your point why s3=/s/ should have prevented a merger with s1=/š/.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Also another point is that Phoenician 'shin' became sigma when the Greek alphabet was created, which would tend to support my idea as well. Samekh became xi in Greek, which may tell us something about how they differed. Note that neither of them are close to /š/...


No? Greek Sigma is pretty close to /š/ even in modern Greek. We have been over this before but you choose to ignore it. Neither Greek or Latin phonemically distinguished between /s/ and /š/.


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## Abu Rashid

> No? Greek Sigma is pretty close to /š/ even in modern Greek



From wikipedia: *Sigma* (upper case *Σ*, lower case *σ*, lower case in  word-final position *ς*; Greek  Σιγμα) is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, and carries the /s/ sound.

Admittedly I don't know much about greek, but I was under the impression it was an /s/ sound like in Ἰησοῦς (Iesous, not Ieshoush). Please correct any misconceptions I may have there.

Also another point I forgot to mention is that in late Sabaic, s1 and s3 began to merge also, which matches with Arabic's merger, not with Hebrew's, unless we consider that Hebrew reversed sin/shin. This is further evidence the pronunciation of OSA was probably more like Arabic's, whilst Hebrew's is the one which has become reversed.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> From wikipedia: *Sigma* (upper case *Σ*, lower case *σ*, lower case in  word-final position *ς*; Greek  Σιγμα) is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, and carries the /s/ sound.
> 
> Admittedly I don't know much about greek, but I was under the impression it was an /s/ sound like in Ἰησοῦς (Iesous, not Ieshoush). Please correct any misconceptions I may have there.


If you ask a Greek whether he says Ieshoush or Iesous he would ask "What's the difference?". And that's how people pronounce the Sigma. The center of gravity is /s/ but with such a large variability that it sometimes sounds like an "s", sometimes like a "sh" and sometimes anything in between, it simply doesn't matter. The same it true for the Spanish "s" which is produced with the tip of the tongue pointing upwards and cannot decide if it wants to sound more like an "s" or like a "sh".

Languages don't have to contrast "s" and "sh" sounds. It is quite possible that PS had no "sh" sound at all. It is quite possible (and one of the theories discussed because of the Samekh becoming Xi in Greek) that s1 was /s/, s2 /ɬ/ and s3 /ks/. We simply don't know this.

Throughout this thread you are presupposing that the "s"-"sh" opposition is in the centre of the development and that other sounds discussed, like /ɬ/, were marginal. This is by no means certain. It is quite possible that the Shibboleth story had nothing to do with "s" vs. "sh" but might have been about entirely different sound properties.

Let's take another example from our own languages: Neither the German "sch" nor the English "sh" existed 1600 years ago when the Roman Empire started to crumble in the West. Both developed out of /sk/ (_"sc"_ as in Old English _Englisc_ or Old High German _Tiudisc_), in Old High German possibly with an intermediate state /sç/.



Abu Rashid said:


> Also another point I forgot to mention is that in late Sabaic, s1 and s3 began to merge also, which matches with Arabic's merger, not with Hebrew's, unless we consider that Hebrew reversed sin/shin. This is further evidence the pronunciation of OSA was probably more like Arabic's, whilst Hebrew's is the one which has become reversed.


And what does this tell us about s2? Why must a s3-s1 merger push s2 towards "sh"? 

A possible Hebrew reversal discussed in the quote in #90 was between s3 and s1. The s3-s2 merger was probably relatively late.


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## Abu Rashid

mungu,



			
				Me said:
			
		

> mungu said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Well one reason is that Hebrew and Aramaic  are the only surviving  languages that have kept that phoneme separate  from all the other  sibilants (abstracting from MSAn).
> 
> 
> 
> This is a very good point.
Click to expand...


Actually perhaps this isn't as good a point as I first thought. Isn't [θ] (tha) considered a sibilant? Because it merged into the 'peace' phoneme in Hebrew (and Aramaic I think).



> this assumption about Proto-Semitic is based on only one of the two  languages, and you choose to ignore all the various evidence for the  "satiated" phoneme having been originally a lateral /ɬ/, the many cases  in which it alternates with /l/ (in related roots as well as loanwords)  etc.



I find this idea highly unlikely. Especially if it's claimed the /l/ value for Arabic 'shin' existed even into the Islamic period. There are roots in Arabic, which stretch back to that time which have /l/ as the second radical, and it's pretty much impossible for a Semitic root (in Arabic anyway, and I think across to the board) to have the same letter as first and second radical in the root. Also there is a root in Arabic شلل (shalala) which if shin was originally an /l/ type sound, then it would have pretty much been something like 'lalala'. This doesn't seem likely at all.


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## Outsider

Here's an interactive table where you can hear the /ɬ/ sound. It's quite different from an ordinary /l/.



berndf said:


> If you ask a Greek whether he says Ieshoush or Iesous he would ask "What's the difference?". And that's how people pronounce the Sigma. The center of gravity is /s/ but with such a large variability that it sometimes sounds like an "s", sometimes like a "sh" and sometimes anything in between, it simply doesn't matter. The same it true for the Spanish "s" which is produced with the tip of the tongue pointing upwards and cannot decide if it wants to sound more like an "s" or like a "sh".


I think a more precise description is that the "s" of Spanish and Greek (at least in many dialects) is neither "s" nor "sh". There are actually many distinct "s"-sounds, most of which grouped under the heading of "voiceless alveolar fricatives". The "s" of English or German (and, I suppose, Arabic) is a laminal consonant, /s̻/, while the "s" of Greek and northern Spanish is an apical consonant, /s̺/. The apical "s" can sound like a /ʃ/ to non-natives, but it's a different sound.


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## berndf

Outsider said:


> The apical "s" can sound like a /ʃ/ to non-natives, but it's a different sound.


The same what you explained about the /s/ being a generic label for several differently produced sounds is also true for /ʃ/. Different languages with phonemic /ʃ/ can produce it quite differently. E.g. French "ch" is considerably different from the German "sch" and even within a language speakers can produce it differently. E.g I (northern German) produce the "sch" in German with tip of the tongue near the lower alveolar ridge while my wife (Austrian speaking, like me, standard German) produces it with the tip of the tongue behind the upper alveolar ridge. The difference is a bit similar to that between the "normal" and the "dark" <l> in English: An audible difference if you pay attention but phonemically undistinguished.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> I find this idea highly unlikely. Especially if it's claimed the /l/ value for Arabic 'shin' existed even into the Islamic period. There are roots in Arabic, which stretch back to that time which have /l/ as the second radical, and it's pretty much impossible for a Semitic root (in Arabic anyway, and I think across to the board) to have the same letter as first and second radical in the root. Also there is a root in Arabic شلل (shalala) which if shin was originally an /l/ type sound, then it would have pretty much been something like 'lalala'. This doesn't seem likely at all.


You must have misunderstood Mungo. By saying that /ɬ/ "alternated" with /l/ he didn't mean that speakers would have confused the sounds. Alternation means in linguistics that one sound if replaced by another under certain phonetic, syntactic or semantic conditions. An example of alternation is when the center vowel "u" in "to run" changes to "a" ("ran") in the past tense. This of course does not mean that "we run" and "we ran" sound the same to  native English speakers.


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## Abu Rashid

> You must have misunderstood Mungo. By saying that /ɬ/ "alternated" with  /l/ he didn't mean...



Not at all, I understood perfectly. He meant that sometimes roots with a pretty similar meaning have /l/ in place of /š/. Probably just a coincidence. As for the transliteration into Iberian Romance languages, as I mentioned, they are pretty inaccurate. I barely recognise most Arabic words that've been borrowed into Spanish. They just completely butchered them.

However /ɬ/ is a lateral (or /l/ type sound) and therefore to have a root with 3 very close sounding letters like that, would've been very unlikely in Arabic. Just as we'd probably never have sasasha or shasasa or namana or manama or other such combinations, because the sounds are too similar. This is a pretty well known 'unwritten rule' in most Semitic languages.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> However /ɬ/ is a lateral (or /l/ type sound) and therefore to have a root with 3 very close sounding letters like that, would've been very unlikely in Arabic. Just as we'd probably never have sasasha or shasasa or namana or manama or other such combinations, because the sounds are too similar. This is a pretty well known 'unwritten rule' in most Semitic languages.


Good observation. It would be interesting to clarify the etymology of شلل. It is a noun meaning "paralysis", right?. I didn't find a verbal root s2-L-L so far. Hebrew only has a Verb s1-L-L meaning_ to reject, to revoke_. In Hebrew I am not aware of any verbs with s2-L as first and second radical.


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## Abu Rashid

> It would be interesting to clarify the etymology of شلل. It is a noun meaning "paralysis", right?. I didn't find a verbal root s2-L-L so far.



When the last two radicals are the same, they merge and tashdeed is used, so it is شلّ

There's also other roots which have shin-lam as the first two radicals, like شلح شلغ 



> And what does this tell us about s2? Why must a s3-s1 merger push s2 towards "sh"?



The s3-s1 merger doesn't tell us anything about s2 necessarily, but it does suggest s1 at least was fairly similar to how it was in Arabic, since the same process occurred there. From what I can see, it seems more likely OSA phonemes were closer to Arabic than to Hebrew, and this is just another instance of a correlation which strengthens the idea.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> There's also other roots which have shin-lam as the first two radicals, like *شلح* شلغ


I am also unable to verify a root s2-L-7. Can you help me there? I only found s1-L-7 which means "to send, to reach out" in Hebrew.


Abu Rashid said:


> The s3-s1 merger doesn't tell us anything about s2 necessarily, but it does suggest s1 at least was fairly similar to how it was in Arabic, since the same process occurred there. From what I can see, it seems more likely OSA phonemes were closer to Arabic than to Hebrew, and this is just another instance of a correlation which strengthens the idea.


I still fail to see your point what this tells us concerning the pronunciation of s2 in Sabaean?

I think Beeston did extensive work on this (PHONOLOGY OF THE EPIGRAPHIC SOUTH ARABIAN UNVOICED SIBILANTS, 1951 and subsequent articles). I have no access to this. Can someone find out what he had to say about the reconstruction of s2 in OSA?


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## Abu Rashid

> I am also unable to verify a root s2-L-7. Can you help me there? I only found s1-L-7 which means "to send, to reach out" in Hebrew.


It means to undress.



> I still fail to see your point what this tells us concerning the pronunciation of s2 in Sabaean?


As I said it doesn't necessarily tell us anything about s2. My point in mentioning that merger never was about s2, I am at a loss to see why you keep returning back to it's supposed relevance to s2.

My point was that in Hebrew and Arabic s3 (Samekh) seems to have merged with one of the s1/s2 (sin/shin) letters. In each language it was the opposite letter, and each language has opposite pronunciations for them, which to me indicates the difference in mergers is related to the reversal in pronunciations. In OSA the same thing began to happen in the last few centuries of the languages' usage, and it was merged with the same sibilant as Arabic merged with, not Hebrew. This tends to suggest Arabic had a more similar sounding group of sibilants to OSA than Hebrew did. But as my theory above mentions in more Ancient Hebrew (what I consider pre-reversal Hebrew), there also was mixing/merging the same sibilants as both OSA and Arabic, then all of a sudden it reversed and begun merging the other sibilant with Samekh.

As I said, it doesn't tell us anything about s2 at all, other than that Hebrew has probably now merged it's s2-equivalent sibilant with it's s3-equivalent because it's s2-equivalent switched pronunciation at some point with it's s1-equivalent sibilant.

The point is not about the pronunciation of s2 at all, it's about indications that Hebrew has reversed it's sin/shin letters' pronunciation.

You keep suggesting this isn't important, but this is the reason I initially opened this thread, was to understand why Arabic and Hebrew have these two letters reversed in pronunciation. And as a side note how samekh fits into the whole sibilant situation.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> I am at a loss to see why you keep returning back to it's supposed relevance to s2.


Because s2 is where we are disagreeing upon, not s1 or s3. Plain and simple.

 As we are speaking about shifts and mergers of at least 3 closely  related sibilants talking in terms of "switching" is probably too narrow  minded an approach. The types of re-shuffles involved may have been  more complex.

There are many different theories about PS s1 and s3. That one of them was "s" and one of them was "sh" (one way or the other) are only two of them. As I said many times, I don't know which is right nor do I think anybody knows. Some scholars believe that neither of them was "sh" in PS. And this needs to be taken seriously.

Theories gaining more and more popularity (I don't dare voice an opinion on my own here) these days reconstruct s1 as /s/, s2 as /ɬ/ and s3 as a combination with a stop or a dorsal fricative, [ts], [ks] or [χs]. 



Abu Rashid said:


> The point is not about the pronunciation of s2 at all, it's about indications that Hebrew has reversed it's sin/shin letters' pronunciation.


I haven't seen any serious argument suggesting that. Switches are discussed but then between Samekh and Shin, not between Shin and Sin. There obviously must have been a merger between Sin and Shin in other Canaanite dialects. The fact that you find three different mergers (s1-s2 suggested by the alphabet which has only one letter for both, the (mishnaic/modern?) Hebrew merger s3-s2 and the s3-s1 merger suggested by the Shibboleth story) in the same dialect continuum makes the situation quite complex and though I like Occam's razor, in this case I wouldn't want to go for the "simplest" solution.



Abu Rashid said:


> It means to undress.


Is it attested in classical Arabic? I found this only as being marked "Levantine" (here). For your argument to be valid we would have to establish a PS root starting s2-L, not just a modern dialect word starting sh-L which might be a later borrowing.


----------



## Abu Rashid

> Because s2 is where we are disagreeing upon, not s1 or s3. Plain and  simple.



As far as I have understood we disagree on both s1 and s2.



> As we are speaking about shifts and mergers of at least 3 closely   related sibilants talking in terms of "switching" is probably too narrow   minded an approach. The types of re-shuffles involved may have been   more complex.



Well the merger is a side issue, and relates to whether s1 or s2 merges with s3. The main issue I'm concerned with is why s1/s2 are reversed between Arabic/Hebrew. Whether you accept it or not, they appear to be reversed, the merger does not affect that.



> Some scholars believe that neither of them was "sh" in PS. And this  needs to be taken seriously.



Indeed, this is what I've said all along, that s2 is "sh", not s1 or s3. As I've noted the case of s1 being "sh" seems to be related to a reversal between s1 and s2.



> The fact that you find three different mergers (s1-s2 suggested by the  alphabet which has only one letter for both, the (mishnaic/modern?)  Hebrew merger s3-s2 and the s3-s1 merger suggested by the Shibboleth  story) in the same dialect continuum makes the situation quite complex  and though I like Occam's razor, in this case I wouldn't want to go for  the "simplest" solution.



I don't think it makes it that complex at all.

It seems quite obvious there was in Hebrew mixing between s1 and s3 in ancient times (as with Arabic and OSA), and then later the mixing switched to being between s2 and s3. And we also know that Hebrew has s1 and s2 reversed in comparison to Arabic (or Arabic has them reversed in comparison to Hebrew, if you like). The only logical conclusion would seem that a reversal in Hebrew occurred.

I don't know why you keep completely ignoring this blatantly obvious conclusion.

Am I missing something here? Or is it quite clearly a very strong possibility?



> Is it attested in classical Arabic?



Yes. There is reference to a noun derived from it in Lisan al-Arab and it mentions it is referenced from a hadith (so from beginning of Islamic period). It is suggested to be originally Arabic or Nabataean.



> I found this only as being marked "Levantine" (here).  For your argument to be valid we would have to establish a PS root  starting s2-L, not just a modern dialect word starting sh-L which might  be a later borrowing.



Agreed, but keep in mind that most modern dialect words still derive from Classical Arabic. They might be modified or specific synonyms are favoured in one dialect over another, but they mostly have their roots in CA.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> As far as I have understood we disagree on both s1 and s2.


No, I have no strong opinion about s1 though I find s1=/s/ the most plausible assumption. All in all, I find s1=/s/, s2=/ɬ/ and s3=[ts], [ks] or [χs] the most interesting hypothesis. But I wouldn't go further than that (calling it "interesting").





Abu Rashid said:


> Indeed, this is what I've said all along, that s2 is "sh", not s1 or s3. As I've noted the case of s1 being "sh" seems to be related to a reversal between s1 and s2.


Some scholars believe that neither of them *the three* was "sh" in PS. And this   needs to be taken seriously.





Abu Rashid said:


> It seems quite obvious there was in Hebrew mixing between s1 and s3 in ancient times (as with Arabic and OSA), and then later the mixing switched to being between s2 and s3. And we also know that Hebrew has s1 and s2 reversed in comparison to Arabic (or Arabic has them reversed in comparison to Hebrew, if you like). The only logical conclusion would seem that a reversal in Hebrew occurred.


In different dialects, not in sequence. It is not possible that sounds first merge and then separate again along etymological lines. But it seems quite clear that the merger between Samekh and Sin happen relatively late when Hebrew spelling was already fixed and when Samekh and Shin had already the sound values they have today; otherwise there would have been more unetymological spelling there there really are.


----------



## Abu Rashid

> It is not possible that sounds first merge and then separate again along  etymological lines.


Well the mixing seems to be minor, there's just a few words that I've come across which mix shin/samekh (s1/s3). So I don't think it's a matter of them mixing them and then separating, since they never ended up merging. Wouldn't it go without saying that merging would begin with sporadic mixing up? So that it eventually becomes the case that people can't distinguish which one was which and so they become one?



> No, I have no strong opinion about s1 though I find s1=/s/ the most  plausible assumption.


Haven't you been proposing all along that s1=/š/??? That's certainly what your charts seem to say.



> Some scholars believe that neither of them *the three*  was "sh" in PS. And this   needs to be taken seriously.



Seems strange that separate languages would spontaneously just invent "sh" sound simultaneously.... I don't get this theorising about something not existing which exists. "sh" is a phoneme in pretty much all known modern Semitic languages. Did they all just co-incidentally develop it in parallel? As i said, such theories are akin to scratching your right ear with your left hand from over the top of your head.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Agreed, but keep in mind that most modern dialect words still derive from Classical Arabic. They might be modified or specific synonyms are favoured in one dialect over another, but they mostly have their roots in CA.


I am not saying you are wrong. I am saying it merits a more careful investigation because your argument is quite good. The first two radicals are indeed a bit special, supposedly being older 2-character proto-roots from which the later 3-character roots developed by differentiation.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Haven't you been proposing all along that s1=/š/??? That's certainly what your charts seem to say.


No, that was Mungo. I always said the question was undecided.

I have done a lot of history and philosophy of science and there you learn to present a theory with all its merits without relieving what you think yourself. I tried to do exactly that: presenting the different theories with their strengths and weaknesses so you can judge for yourself without mixing it with my own ideas. Maybe I did my job too well and confused you by this.

The only thing I am a bit opinionated about is that s2 was not a pure "sh" sound but had a lateral component. I find the arguments in favour of this quite strong. In this context you might want to extend your quest to the emphatic unvoiced sibilants to which they also count Ḍad though it is not a sibilant any more in modern Arabic. It is supposed to have been an emphatic sibilant with a lateral component (native speakers told me such a lateral component is still present in modern Arabic), i.e. something close to [ɬˁ]. The idea is that while Ṣad is the emphatic equivalent of Sin, Ḍad is the emphatic equivalent of Shin. The choice of letters in Arabic, Sin and Ṣad being the undotted and Shin and Ḍad the dotted variants of the respective base letters suggests that a certain correspondence was still "felt" in early classical times, i.e. Sin=[s]/Ṣad=[sˁ], Shin=[ɬ]/Ḍad=/[ɬˁ]. In those days Shin might already have moved most of the way towards its modern sound value but might have retained just enough of a [ɬ] for people to have "felt" the relationship with Ḍad.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Seems strange that separate languages would spontaneously just invent "sh" sound simultaneously.... I don't get this theorising about something not existing which exists. "sh" is a phoneme in pretty much all known modern Semitic languages. Did they all just co-incidentally develop it in parallel? As i said, such theories are akin to scratching your right ear with your left hand from over the top of your head.


It is not that uncommon. PIE also didn't have a /ʃ/  sound; Greek didn't have it, Latin didn't have it, Common Germanic didn't have it, yet is very common in modern European languages. Slavic languages have even developed half a dozen different and phonemically distinguished "sh"-like sounds. In Western Germanic (out of which both our mother tongues English and German evolved) the /ʃ/ evolved as a result of lenition of /k/ after /s/ (as in OE _Englisc_ > ModE. _English_): /sk/>/sç/>/ʃ/ which also explains the spelling as a digraph; in OE [ç] represented by "h", es in _niht_ [nIçt], modE _night_.

The problem with your explanation is that it involves an exchange of sound values of two phonemes and it is extremely difficult to construct a phonological process by which this should happen unless you assume a multi-stage process involving other sounds which later get lost. I.e. A>B, B>A could happen as A>C, B>A and then in a second step C>B. The assumption what s2 was very close to /ʃ/ but has a distinguishing characteristic (you can regard /ɬ/ as a sequence of /ʃ/ and an unvoiced version of the /l/, much like you can regard German or Italian /z/ as a sequence /ts/) which faded only relatively late in Western Semitic simplifies the explanations quite a bit.


----------



## Abu Rashid

> The problem with your explanation is that it involves an exchange of  sound values of two phonemes and it is extremely difficult to construct a  phonological process by which this should happen unless you assume a  multi-stage process involving other sounds which later get lost. I.e.  A>B, B>A could happen as A>C, B>A and then in a second step  C>B.


This is true, it does seem strange that it would occur.

The way I've imagined it was that it occurred is either of two ways:

1) Both pronunciations existed within various Hebrew dialects (as shibboleth incident indicates) and early on one pronunciation was predominant, and later on the other became predominant. However, I just noticed that you seem to regard this incident as being a mix between shin and samekh, is that correct? I thought it was between shin and sin.

2) s¹ (or s²) was initially somewhere between /s/ and /š/ and in Hebrew it went one way and in Arabic the other way, and this pushed s² (or s¹) the other way.

Another interesting thing I just noted is that in a Hebrew dictionary online, they show the old spelling for words (with the phoneician-like alphabet) and in that words with sin in them are spelled with samekh, was this common?? If so this adds a whole new level of confusion to the status of Hebrew and the sibiliants.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> 1) Both pronunciations existed within various Hebrew dialects (as shibboleth incident indicates) and early on one pronunciation was predominant, and later on the other became predominant. However, I just noticed that you seem to regard this incident as being a mix between shin and samekh, is that correct? I thought it was between shin and sin.


Yes, that is correct. Judges 12.6 reads "...ויאמרו לו אמר־נא  *שבלת* ויאמר *סבלת*" ("[they] said to him say please *shibboleth* and [when/if he] said *Sibboleth*..."), i.e. the Ephraimites pronounced Shin like Samekh. A Greek transliteration would have been very interesting here but, alas, the Septuagint translates this verse rather freely and doesn't attempt to transliterate סבלת.


Abu Rashid said:


> 2) s¹ (or s²) was initially somewhere between /s/ and /š/ and in Hebrew  it went one way and in Arabic the other way, and this pushed s² (or s¹)  the other way.
> 
> Another interesting thing I just noted is that in a Hebrew dictionary online, they show the old spelling for words (with the phoneician-like alphabet) and in that words with sin in them are spelled with samekh, was this common?? If so this adds a whole new level of confusion to the status of Hebrew and the sibiliants.


I don't know. I only know that you'll find all sorts of variant spellings in early text. The dialect situation must have been quite complex and involves all three s-sounds. Also Arabic Sin is a descendant from both s1 and s3. Hence I wouldn't be satisfied with an explanation which is based only an s1 and s2 and doesn't explain s3 as well. But your theory might well explain part of the story; if not all the way from PS then maybe within Central Semitic at a later stage.

Could you point me to that site and the examples you found there?


----------



## Abu Rashid

> Yes, that is correct. Judges 12.6 reads "...ויאמרו לו אמר־נא  *שבלת* ויאמר *סבלת*"  ("[they] said to him say please *shibboleth* and  [when/if he] said *Sibboleth*..."),  i.e. the Ephraimites pronounced Shin like Samekh.


Interesting. In Arabic it's spelt with sin, so I would've assumed the mix up was between sin/shin. Perhaps what I mentioned above about sin being spelled as samekh in old Hebrew is the reason for this.



> Also Arabic Sin is a descendant from both s1 and s3. Hence I wouldn't be  satisfied with an explanation which is based only an s1 and s2 and  doesn't explain s3 as well.


The fact that s³ is also merged in doesn't really change the situation that much, any more than the fact that 'tha' is merged into Hebrew's s¹ changes the situation of the reversal between sin/shin. Pretty much consistently all words with shin (s¹) in Hebrew have sin (and some 'tha') as their sound in Arabic, the reverse from Arabic to Hebrew, obviously with samekh being mixed in, instead of 'tha'. Those mergers don't affect the fact that sin/shin are reversed.



> Could you point me to that site and the examples you found there?


Sure, here it is.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Interesting. In Arabic it's spelt with sin, so  I would've assumed the mix up was between sin/shin.


Whatever the sound value of Samekh might have been in the days of the Judges, at the time of the Quran it was certainly /s/. It is natural to transcribe Hebrew Samekh with Arabic Sin. 


Abu Rashid said:


> The fact that s³ is also merged in doesn't really change the situation that much, any more than the fact that 'tha' is merged into Hebrew's s¹ changes the situation of the reversal between sin/shin. Pretty much consistently all words with shin (s¹) in Hebrew have sin (and some 'tha') as their sound in Arabic, the reverse from Arabic to Hebrew, obviously with samekh being mixed in, instead of 'tha'. Those mergers don't affect the fact that sin/shin are reversed.


Well, it is important because one might conjecture the Arabic Sin inherited its sound value from s3 and not from s1, as you presuppose, and that the sound value of s1 got lost. I.e PS s1 & s3 might have been like in Hebrew and s2=/ɬ/. The development in Arabic would then have been s1>s3 and at a later stage s2>s1. Hebrew would then have had the sound shift s2>s3 while Phoenician had s2>s1 (explaining a single letter for s1 and s2 in the Phoenician script). This explanation is not at all implausible and it is extremely simple because it explains the developments in these languages at the same time and is consistent with Modern South Arabian (the only living Semitic language group still distinguishing three s-sounds). It is in essence what Mungo advocated. Unless you have a theory which explains all three better, this theory appears sounder than yours.


Abu Rashid said:


> Sure, here it is.


Thank you. I will have a look.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Another interesting thing I just noted is that in a Hebrew dictionary online, they show the old spelling for words (with the phoneician-like alphabet) and in that words with sin in them are spelled with samekh, was this common?? If so this adds a whole new level of confusion to the status of Hebrew and the sibiliants.


I checked the site. They say that the s2 sound was represented by the letter Samekh rather than by the letter Shin in Paleo-Hebrew script. They don't say where they got this from and it sounds strange to be. I checked two well known Paleo-Hebrew inscriptions showing the name "Israel" which contains a Sin (s2) in modern spelling: The Tel Dan Stele (Aramaic) and the Mesha Stele (Moabite) both use Shin and not Samekh to in the name "Israel".


----------



## Abu Rashid

> Whatever the sound value of Samekh might have been in the days of the  Judges, at the time of the Quran it was certainly /s/. It is natural to  transcribe Hebrew Samekh with Arabic Sin.



I meant etymologically. The samekh spelling in the Bible is no doubt a deliberate misspelling of the word to try and reproduce it the way they 'defectively' pronounced it.

So in Arabic it is sin (s¹ not s³) as it is in MSA languages too I think.



> Well, it is important because one might conjecture the Arabic Sin  inherited its sound value from s3 and not from s1, as you presuppose,  and that the sound value of s1 got lost.



Well it seems more logical. s³ seems to have vanished from pretty much all Semitic languages and was either merged with s¹ or s² depending on the sound value at the time of those two letters. As I said above, I think this is probably because it was too close in value to sin (/s/). This is supported by the fact that in both modern Hebrew and Arabic it's merged with sin phonetically, and in ancient Hebrew it was becoming confused with the letter that represented s¹ (now called shin, but I suggest was sin in that time).



> This explanation is not at all implausible and it is extremely simple



And what about Ancient South Arabian and the Ethiopic languages?

It's not simple because it doesn't explain how s² in Arabic ended up as /š/ and also it doesn't explain why s³ merged with opposing sounds in Arabic and Hebrew.

I think my theory is much simpler and seems to make more sense regarding the merging of s³ in pretty much every single language.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> I meant etymologically. The samekh spelling in the Bible is no doubt a deliberate misspelling of the word to try and reproduce it the way they 'defectively' pronounced it.
> 
> So in Arabic it is sin (s¹ not s³) as it is in MSA languages too I think.


I see no reason why the Arabic transcription should be etymologically correct. It is a translation of a text which was more than 1200 years old at the time and which tells a story which is supposed to have taken place another 400-500 years earlier. I am convinced it is a phonetic transliteration based on the respective Hebrew and Arabic sound values of the time of the Quran.


Abu Rashid said:


> s³ seems to have vanished from pretty much all Semitic languages


I tend to agree with you but not everyone and evidence one way or the other is only circumstantial.


Abu Rashid said:


> And what about Ancient South Arabian...


That doesn't help much because the reconstructions of OSA are equally contested.


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## Abu Rashid

> I see no reason why the Arabic transcription should be etymologically  correct


I think you've missed the point there. The cognate word of Shibboleth exists in Arabic as Siblah, which seems to be how they were pronouncing it, although samekh is written I think it'd be more likely that tribe reversed sin/shin, but since they were written with the same letter, then writing it with sin instead of shin wouldn't have shown anything, and the story wouldn't make sense, so they used samekh instead, which probably sounded close to sin. Some Hebraists also think it might've actually been a different root beginning with 'tha' and not shin at all, because 'tha' had merged in mainstream Hebrew by this time, but possibly not in some dialects.

The fact 'tha' merged into s¹ in Hebrew is also another indication to me that s¹ and s² reversed in Hebrew. In Arabic 'tha' and 'sin' get mixed up sometimes, but never 'tha' and 'shin', which to me indicates it's probably more likely 'tha' merged into s¹ when it had a value of /s/ prior to a reversal to /š/. Not sure if this is common amongst other languages as well.



> I tend to agree with you but not everyone and evidence one way or the  other is only circumstantial.


You're right it is all very circumstantial, and I don't mean to imply my theory is by any means the only one worthy of investigating. I just think it would seem to be a valid theory.

You've helped me think about this issue a lot during the course of this thread, and I thank you for taking the time to reiterate and clarify things.



> That doesn't help much because the reconstructions of OSA are equally  contested.


True they are, but the merger between s¹ and s³ tends to indicate to me that OSA was undergoing similar processes to Arabic, and that these two phonemes probably shared similar values. I honestly can't see any reason whatsoever to suggest it was more like Hebrew in this respect.

I think that because of the initial rush to liken OSA to Arabic, the complete opposite is now occurring and there seems to be a movement to almost disavow any link between them. Modern day Arabic was in very close proximity to OSA and used its script (prior to adopting the present Arabic script) and there also seems to be quite a lot of vocabulary shared between the two, not shared with any other Semitic languages, which to me indicates a very close series of links.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> although samekh is written I think it'd be  more likely that tribe reversed sin/shin


This would be a pure ad-hoc assumption to fit your theory. There is no indication of this, though it is of course possible. The text reads they pronounced it as if written with Samekh. Unfortunately, there is no other information. 


Abu Rashid said:


> Some Hebraists also think it might've actually been a different root  beginning with 'tha' and not shin at all, because 'tha' had merged in  mainstream Hebrew by this time, but possibly not in some dialects.


Really? I haven't heard this. Do you know why? Is this because of the rendering with <t> in the Vulgata?
interrogabant eum dic ergo *sebboleth* quod interpretatur spica qui  respondebat *tebboleth *eadem littera spicam exprimere non valens  statimque adprehensum iugulabant in ipso Iordanis transitu et ceciderunt  in illo tempore de Ephraim quadraginta duo milia​ That would be a weak argument. Normally, the Vulgata transliterates all three, Samekh, Sin and Shin as <s>. In this case it is really more likely that the <t> is just anything to make a difference. Hebrew had re-developed a /θ/ which is lost again in modern Hebrew becoming /t/ in Sphardi and /s/ in Ashkenasi pronunciation. The Vulgata represents this /θ/ as <th>.


Abu Rashid said:


> You've helped me think about this issue a lot during the course of this thread, and I thank you for taking the time to reiterate and clarify things.


You are welcome.


----------



## Abu Rashid

Btw berndf when looking up the modern pronunciation of Hebrew letters in regards to the other topic I came across something of interest to this thread.

In the Wikipedia table of Hebrew phonology, they reconstruct Biblical Hebrew as pronouncing s¹ as 's' as Arabic (and the South Semitic languages) do, not as the 'š' that they do today. All subsequent historical and modern pronunciations then shift to 'š'.

They also reconstruct Biblical 'כ' as /k/, which later splits into /k/ (with dagesh) and /x/ (without).


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> In the Wikipedia table of Hebrew phonology, they reconstruct Biblical Hebrew as pronouncing s¹ as 's' as Arabic (and the South Semitic languages) do, not as the 'š' that they do today. All subsequent historical and modern pronunciations then shift to 'š'.


Thank you. And they reconstruct s3 as [ts]. I mentioned this hypothesis about the original PS sound values in post #2.


----------



## Abu Rashid

>> moved from this thread

bernd,



			
				bernd said:
			
		

> This is actually regular: The PS origin in _s1-L-M_ and _s1_ became _sh_ in NW-Semitic and _s_ in Arabic.



It appears to be 's' in all south Semitic, not just Arabic. Also other north-west Semitic languages merged s1 & s2, so I'd say just Hebrew & Aramaic.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Also other north-west Semitic languages merged s1 & s2


Sure, other Caananite dialects must have, otherwise why should they create an alphabet using the same letter for both (ש). Why do you say "also"? Arabic merged s1(שׁ)&s3(ס) to س and not s1(שׁ)&s2(שׂ).



Abu Rashid said:


> , so I'd say just Hebrew & Aramaic.


Whether they merged s2(שׂ)&s3(ס) as Hebrew did or s1(שׁ)&s2(שׂ) as Ugaritic did, s1(שׁ) always ended up as "sh", so, no, it is not just Hebrew and Aramaic.


----------



## Abu Rashid

bernd said:
			
		

> Why do you say "also"?



Because their merging of s1 & s2 means that they are irrelevant for discussing how s1 & s2 ended up being realised in Semitic languages.



			
				bernd said:
			
		

> Whether they merged s2(שׂ)&s3(ס) as Hebrew did or s1(שׁ)&s2(שׂ)  as Ugaritic did, s1(שׁ) always ended up as "sh", so, no, it is not just  Hebrew and Aramaic.



But s2 also ended up as 'sh' as it does in south Semitic, so one could equally say those languages follow the south Semitic pattern, and be just as correct.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> But s2 also ended up as 'sh' as it does in south Semitic, so one could equally say those languages follow the south Semitic pattern, and be just as correct.


South Semitic s2 isn't always "sh"; Ge'ez, e.g., retained PS /ɬ/. Arabic s2 is "sh" but Arabic is not South Semitic. In my statement (_This is actually regular: The PS origin in s1-L-M and __s1 became __sh in NW-Semitic and __s in Arabic._), I only spoke about s1 and its development in NW-Semitic and Arabic, not about s2 at all. And I still think that this statement is correct.


----------



## Abu Rashid

berndf said:
			
		

> I only spoke about s1 and its development in NW-Semitic and Arabic, not  about s2 at all. And I still think that this statement is correct.



You'd not be incorrect, just as I wouldn't be incorrect in taking your statement and applying it to Arabic:

_Whether they merged s1(שׁ)&s3(ס) as Arabic did or s1(שׁ)&s2(שׂ)   as Ugaritic did, s2(שׂ) always ended up as "sh", so, no, it is not just Arabic._

Correct?

Ugaritic, Phoenician and even Akkadian, no more agree with Hebrew & Aramaic that s1 should be 'sh' than they agree with Arabic that s2 should be 'sh', since they do not distinguish between s1 & s2, their inclusion to bolster a position on which one should be 'sh' is absolutely pointless. I feel we've been over this in another thread before bernd.

All we can say is this, some languages realise s1 as 'sh' and they merged the other (s2) with s3, whilst other languages realise s2 as 'sh' and they merged the other (s1) with s3. Note that Sayhadic in later times merged s1 with s3, indicating it was in line with the Arabic position. Also note that 'tha' merged with s1 in all NW-Semitic (excluding Aramaic & Ugaritic) and in south Semitic it also merged with s1, and it's much more likely to have merged with an 's' sound than an 'sh' sound, indicating the 'sh' for s1 in Hebrew was originally an 's' sound back in the time when that merge occurred, later shifting to 'sh', which meant s2 ended up merging with s3.



			
				berndf said:
			
		

> South Semitic s2 isn't always "sh"; Ge'ez, e.g., retained PS /ɬ/.



As far as I can tell that's a postulated reconstruction, not a definite.

Ge'ez s1 certainly isn't 'sh' though, it is 's'. Which is the more relevant point there.

Also as I've noted to you before, the south Semitic grapheme which resembles the north Semitic shin (ie. the 3 pronged shape) is the one that matches up to s2, not s1.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> You'd not be incorrect, just as I wouldn't be incorrect in taking your statement and applying it to Arabic:
> 
> _Whether they merged s1(שׁ)&s3(ס) as Arabic did or s1(שׁ)&s2(שׂ)   as Ugaritic did, s2(שׂ) always ended up as "sh", so, no, it is not just Arabic._
> 
> Correct?


Yes. And? The question was the word shalom/salam and that contains s1 and not s2. I am not entering into a beauty contest here _what languages are more similar to what other languages_. I just explained why the development of _S1-L-M_ has been regular, hence I needed to explain s1. S2 is of no concern for this particular question.


Abu Rashid said:


> As far as I can tell that's a postulated reconstruction, not a definite.
> 
> Ge'ez s1 certainly isn't 'sh' though, it is 's'. Which is the more relevant point there.
> 
> Also as I've noted to you before, the south Semitic grapheme which  resembles the north Semitic shin (ie. the 3 pronged shape) is the one  that matches up to s2, not s1.


I have no idea what point you are trying to make here. It has nothing to do with S1-L-M. If your aim is to find out which Semitic language has the "most original" or "most authentic" sibilant system, I am afraid you have to count me out. I am not interested in that question, except maybe in as far as it helps to reconstruct PS sound values. As far as I can see the reconstruction most experts favour is s1=/s/, s2=/ɬ/ or /tɬ/ and s3=/ts/.


----------



## Abu Rashid

I was merely pointing out that languages which merged s1 & s2 are of no use in explaining why Hebrew s1 ended up as 'sh' and Arabic s2 ended up 'sh' (and therefore s1 as 's').


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> I was merely pointing out that languages which merged s1 & s2 are of no use in explaining why Hebrew s1 ended up as 'sh' and Arabic s2 ended up 'sh' (and therefore s1 as 's').


I see. I didn't give any theory _why _s1 became "sh" and Hebrew and "s" in Arabic, only _that_ it did so. In this respect, I said, the development of _Shalom/Salaam_ was regular.


----------



## Abu Rashid

Well not just _why_, but also that they did end up like that. I agree it is indeed regular, but the situation in Phoenician, Ugaritic etc. can tell us nothing about that, agreed?


----------



## berndf

I am still not quite sure what you are after; but if you just wanted to point out that the development of the sibilants wasn't uniform in NW-Semitic languages than we are obviously in agreement.


----------



## Abu Rashid

No.. I merely wanted to point out that of the NW Semitic languages only Aramaic and Hebrew distinguished between s1 & s2, and therefore only Aramaic and Hebrew are relevant when discussing the point of which sibilant ended up being realised as 'sh'.

ie. my original point ["so I'd say just Hebrew & Aramaic"] which you disputed (that led to this tangent of a tangent).

Also my point that all south Semitic languages do distinguish between s1 & s2, and the vast majority render them as 's' and 'sh' respectively.


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## ma7adan

Hi guys,

I tried to follow your intense discussion but sadly I got lost somewhere along the way. From the basic research I have done, I have come to the same general conclusions presented in the table below, that berndf provided. I generally agree with the [ɬ] hypothesis for Arabic [ʃ], which explains the letter ض quite nicely. 

PS..  Phoenician.... Hebrew.............Arabic...........Modern South Arabian
s3    Samekh..........[s] - Samekh....[s] - Sin........[s]
s1    Shin...............[ʃ] - Shin.........[s] - Sin........[ʃ]/
s2    Shin...............[s] - Sin...........[ʃ] - Shin......[ɬ]

However, how does this information account for words where both Arabic and Hebrew have a [ʃ] sound at present, e.g. SHemesh-SHams, and the root ש–ט–פ\ش-ط-ف which refers to gushing water? It would seem that there is more than one [ʃ] in Hebrew, one that corresponds to Arabic [s] and one that corresponds to Arabic [ʃ] . If we believe the table above, how do we explain this observation? 

(By the way, I am sorry if your discussion has already touched upon this. I found it quite hard to follow after a while!)


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## berndf

Yes, the thread has indeed become unduly long. If I remember correctly, we found quite a few exceptions to the general rule we couldn't explain.

The most plausible root for _sun_ seems to be S2-M-S1 (see e.g. here) and Hebrew _Shemesh_ rather than the to be expected _*Semesh_ might be Akkadian/Assyrian influence. _Shamash_ was an important Babylonian deity.


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## Abu Rashid

The idea that Semitic s² was originally [ɬ] seems to be based purely on the situation of the MSA languages. From the little I've learned of these languages their phonology is a mess when compared to the other Semitic languages.

It also seems based on trying to fit the situation of the sibilants in the other Semitic languages around the situation of Hebrew, which was assumed to be the standard for Europeans, who first approached the Semitic languages from the perspective of Hebrew being the "divine" language. Since Hebrew has [ʃ] for s¹ and [s] for s³ then it's assumed that s² must be a sound different from these two by default. This kind of perspective is evident in the way proto-Semitic is transcribed, using all symbols that match Hebrew phonology, and phonemes missing in Hebrew by default get a value from Arabic. The exact same thing happened when Ugaritic was deciphered, if you look at the way it is transcribed, you'll see all phonemes which are shared with Hebrew get the Hebrew value, all others get the Arabic value. Quite obviously not a very scientific method.



> However, how does this information account for words where both Arabic  and Hebrew have a [ʃ] sound at present, e.g. SHemesh-SHams, and the root  ש–ט–פ\ش-ط-ف which refers to gushing water?


Such anomalies are normally the result of borrowings.

As for the case of sh-m-s it appears to be a case of simplification, as bernd said perhaps under Akkadian influence. In Maltese this occured, where it was once presumably shams, it is now shamsh (Maltese orthography: xemx).

In the vast overwhelmingy majority of cases Hebrew & Arabic are consistent for s¹ and s² (consistently opposite that is).



> It would seem that there is more than one [ʃ] in Hebrew, one that  corresponds to Arabic [s] and one that corresponds to Arabic [ʃ]


Hebrew [ʃ] corresponds to Arabic س & ث merged together into one. It does not correspond to any other Arabic phonemes.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> It also seems based on trying to fit the situation of the sibilants in the other Semitic languages around the situation of Hebrew, which was assumed to be the standard for Europeans, who first approached the Semitic languages from the perspective of Hebrew being the "divine" language. Since Hebrew has [ʃ] for s¹ and [s] for s³ then it's assumed that s² must be a sound different from these two by default. This kind of perspective is evident in the way proto-Semitic is transcribed, using all symbols that match Hebrew phonology, and phonemes missing in Hebrew by default get a value from Arabic. The exact same thing happened when Ugaritic was deciphered, if you look at the way it is transcribed, you'll see all phonemes which are shared with Hebrew get the Hebrew value, all others get the Arabic value. Quite obviously not a very scientific method.


This is total nonsense. Hebrew has absolutely nothing to do with this reconstruction. The only impact Hebrew ever had on the discussion was that the spelling situation lead scholars very early to ask themselves, whether early Semitic had two or three non-emphatic sibilants. The [ɬ] hypothesis can already been found, e.g., in Brockelmann's works and it would be absurd to accuse him of being biased towards Hebrew in his research work.


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## ma7adan

Abu Rashid said:


> Hebrew [ʃ] corresponds to Arabic س & ث merged together into one. It does not correspond to any other Arabic phonemes.



That's what I thought, which is why I find the examples of Shemesh and Shotef, which contradict this hypothesis, perplexing. But I agree that these examples are too few to warrant an upheaval of our current theory.


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## clevermizo

Moderator's Note:

The side discussion concerning the pronunciation of Arabic ض (modern /ḍ/) has been split here. The discussions are interrelated as the question discussed whether ض was originally an emphatic sibilant has repercussions on the reconstruction of the non-emphatic sibilant s2. We nevertheless considered a separation of the topics advisable in the interest of clarity.
 

Some of the later posts have been "divided" with appropriate comments to either thread split as necessary. This was attempted in as clean and coherent a manner as possible but if there are any qualms as to the way the discussion was split, do not hesitate to send a PM to one of the moderators. 

This thread has also been re-titled "Proto-Semitic s1, s2 & s3".


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## Fæþ Muuvd Zêrrin

I just discovered this thread, and I'm saddened by the unvarnished hatred for truth and logic displayed by some of the posts. I don't think I need to point out whom I'm blaming for a lack of reason and intellectual honesty. I see no point in wasting precious time trying to answer the non-questions of anyone whose real intentions are to obfuscate the truth and buttress blind belief in something that is not true. But I do think there are parties who will visit this thread (as I did) in order to obtain information on the fascinating history of sibilants in Semitic. Let me therefore summarize THE FACTS for anyone who'll read this far. I will do so without using any unusual symbols or appeals to this or that classical author. Here goes:

(1) Arabic is but one of many modern languages which descend from an ancient proto language, which we may call Proto Semitic. (There are various ideas about how to link Semitic languages into broader categories, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that Arabic is but one of several languages which descend from a single language spoken thousands of years ago.)

(2) Arabic is cover term for a complicated linguistic situation. There are various versions of Modern Arabic (the artificial Modern Standard Arabic used in some media, and the "dialects" (really distinct languages) spoken by common people in places like Egypt, Iraq, etc.). And there is an archaic version of Arabic (Classical Arabic) that was used to write the Koran. This ancient version hasn't been a living language for a very long time.

(3) Classical Arabic, as used in the Koran, is much more recent than the religious writings of other related Semitic languages. Thus the Hebrew scriptures were being written down more than a thousand years before the first line of the Koran was composed.

(4) There is a folk tradition within the Islamic world that attempts to transmit a correct pronunciation of the Koran orally from generation to generation. Its actual beginning date is NOT thoroughly documented, and the tradition is more concerned with PHONEMIC correctness. That is, sound contrasts which also created meaning contrasts in Classical Arabic are faithfully transmitted. PHONETIC realizations of these PHONEMIC differences have not necessarily been preserved unchanged from the beginning of this tradition.

(5) There are three ancient Semitic sounds (all sibilants) which have changed over time in different Semitic languages. Ancient Hebrew actually distinguished all three; however, two of the three did not have their own letter shapes in the Hebrew writing because the alphabet had been created for another Semitic language with only two of the sounds. We know that Ancient Hebrew distinguished all three sounds because a later diacritic was added to one in order to distinguish it. Classical Arabic did NOT preserve all three of these ancient sounds; it only had two such sounds in contrast.

(6) There are Arab languages in the south of the Arabian Peninsula which also preserve all three sounds. These languages have one of the three sibilant sounds as an L-like sound (but voiceless). Since we know that Ancient Hebrew had three distinct sibilant sounds (though Modern Hebrew does not), the most parsimonious explanation is that one of the Ancient Hebrew sibilants was also an L-like sound, as found in the minority Arab languages.

(7) There is reason to believe that Classical Arabic, though it only had two of these sibilants, once had different pronunciations for both of them than it does today in the orally transmitted form memorized by devout Moslems.

(8) But none of that really matters, because the final truth is that there were THREE sibilants; Ancient Hebrew HAD ALL THREE (as sounds) but only two (as letters); Modern Hebrew HAS TWO (as sounds) but three (as letters); Arabic (Classical or Modern Standard Arabic) has just TWO (sounds AND letters).

Any supposed questioning of the above facts is not an attempt at understanding; rather, it's an attempt at pretending that the sounds of Classical Arabic have remained unchanged since the followers of Mohammed tried to remember what he said and write his words down. And that just isn't true. (And, by the way, many religious traditions have had a strong oral component in the transmission of their sacred texts. In the case of Hinduism, they actually managed to transmit vast sections of ancient literature in a form of language that was centuries (if not millennia) old before it was ever written down! Classical Arabic always had a written component on which to lean, so its oral tradition is, perhaps, even less impressive than that.)


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## Ihsiin

Fæþ Muuvd Zêrrin said:


> 6) There are Arab languages in the south of the Arabian Peninsula which also preserve all three sounds. These languages have one of the three sibilant sounds as an L-like sound (but voiceless). Since we know that Ancient Hebrew had three distinct sibilant sounds (though Modern Hebrew does not), the most parsimonious explanation is that one of the Ancient Hebrew sibilants was also an L-like sound, as found in the minority Arab languages.



Do you mean South Arabian languages? If so I think you should avoid calling them "Arab languages" since this is misleading as they're not Arabic languages. If you mean actual Arabic languages, please enlighten me, as I'm not aware of any Arabic dialect that preserves the plain lateral sibilant.


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