ceargaest

[tʃæɑ̯rˠɣæːst]

linguist & software engineer in Lenapehoking; jewish ancom trans woman.

since twitter's burning gonna try bringing my posts about language stuff and losing my shit over star wars and such here - hi!


username etymology
bosworthtoller.com/5952

ceargaest
@ceargaest

חג פורים שמח מיטפייגעלעך!!! היינט הייב איך אן טון ווי אסתר המלכה ווערנדיג א בליענדיגע פלאם־פייערדיגע צום פארדראס פון יענע וואס ווילן אונז אומברענגען. מיר וועלן זיי איבערלעבן!


ceargaest
@ceargaest

I envy Samaritans, who are lucky enough not to have this problem!


In Samaritan Hebrew, the ancient Canaanite phonemes ś /ɬ/ and š /s~ʃ/ merged to /ʃ/, whereas in Jewish Hebrew, ś /ɬ/ merged with s /(t)s/ to /s/ instead. Both languages use alphabets derived from the Phoenician alphabet, and Phoenician, north of the Israelites, relatively early on had the same merger as the neighboring Samaritan Hebrew, at the northern end of Israelite territory, would. Since the Phoenicians had already merged the ś and š phonemes by the time they developed the alphabet, there was only one letter šīn 𐤔 for the merged phoneme; s /(t)s/ was written with the separate letter sāmek 𐤎‎. Hebrew speakers maintained the contrasts between ś /ɬ/, š /ʃ/, and s /s/ for a while, so initially they adopted the Phoenician letter šīn 𐤔 to represent both their /ɬ/ and /s~ʃ/ phonemes. But then when ś /ɬ/ and s /(t)s/ eventually merged to /s/ in southern/Jewish Hebrew, the /s/ phoneme could be spelled with two different letters, one of which also stood for the /ʃ/ phoneme! So anyway that's why you can't guess how to spell a word based on its pronunciation with /s/ in Jewish Hebrew - it could be either sīn שׂ or sāmeḵ ס – and you also can't tell whether a ש is a sīn שׂ /s/ or a šīn שׁ /ʃ/ in unpointed text. Meanwhile for Samaritans, a šān ࠔ is always /ʃ/, and /s/ is always written with sin'gā̊t ࠎ.‎


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