In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language

Rating:
Summary: A thought-provoking introduction to Hebrew
Review: This book makes an interesting reading for everyone, though it seems more suitable to casual learners and students of Hebrew language.
Hoffman's idea is that Masoretic convention does not relate the actual pronunciation at their time. While the opposite is largely a matter of faith, his arguments are not stone hard, either. Oddly, he measures the Massorah against obviously less reliable Origen's Secunda.

Thus, Hoffman suggests that the Tiberian Masoretes incorrectly expanded the schwa to cover not only the reduced vowels, but stops, as well. I would suggest that at that time, all Masoretic schwas were perfectly vocal, and only later a sub-class of them (before plosives) lost vocalization, as happened cross-linguistically.

Hoffman's another interesting argument is that dagesh in the word-initial consonant is arbitrary, since that dagesh might depend on the trope sign, and Masoretes put the tropes arbitrarily to mark the semantic relations. I would suggest, on the contrary, that the tropes mark the actual intonation--which, sure enough, depends on semantics. The words in sub-phrase denoted by intonation are pronounced with a common pitch (syntactic accent). This is evident in smihut, where the second word even reduces the first. So, of course, the words conjugated by intonation affect each other, behaving as a single super-word, and the word-initial dagesh is lost simply because there is not enough pause between the words so conjugated to produce the dagesh.

Hoffman exhibits concern that letter waw in LXX is sometimes rendered as vowel, and sometimes as consonant. But that usage parallels English sound w. Exactly to overcome this phonetic ambiguity, consonantal waw came to be denoted by doubling it (ww).

Take his another example, Rivkah as Rebekka in LXX. I fail to see any problem with that rendering: since Greek has only plosive beta, and nothing for consonant v sound, Rivkah turned Ribkah. Next, epenthesis after the strong plosive turns the word into Rebekah, and the post-tonic gemination - into Rebekkah. Similarly, Calneh turned into Halanni.
The post-tonic gemination also explains other problems Hoffman presents: HanukAh, HanUkkah, HAnnukah; Rosh HashanAh or HashAnnah.

Zebulun-Zebulon (LXX) could change because of the phonetic elongation of stressed u into au.
Double tet in LXX of Chetturah has nothing to do with emphatic consonant, as Hoffman suggests, but is due to the phonetically long e sound attracting the stress and causing gemination.