More language trivia

I may have mentioned before that there are a few letters that sound alike to us today in Hebrew, like Chet/Chaf, Tet/Tav, Ayin/Alef , Samech/Shin, and Kaf/Koof. Apparently in ancient Hebrew these letters sounded different. The Ayin, Chet, and Resh were throaty letters. The language used to have sounds similar to Chinese tones, where one set of root letters could mean two or three different things, depending on the way it was pronounced. Most Israelis today pronounce the throaty and the non-throaty letters interchangeably, but Yemenites still speak them correctly. Arabic speakers do too.

Hebrew became a dead language around the time of Jesus, when it was supplanted by Aramaic. But I just found out last week that Arabic flourished virtually untouched in the isolated area of Saudia Arabia. So if linguists want to know what ancient Hebrew sounds like, they don’t turn to Modern Hebrew at all – they turn to modern Arabic, which is the closest we can get to a proto-Semetic language.

Obviously we don’t have a record of what original Hebrew sounded like, but Phoenician Aramaic has survived in a tiny town in Syria. Our Bible teacher gave us a link to a site that had a recording of part of a Greek Orthodox service, conducted in later period Aramaic. To me, it sounds like a mix of Hebrew and Arabic both, and the chant is *almost* familiar, but not quite. It’s fascinating for those who are interested in such things.

Here are the links:

Part of a spoken service
All sung prayers