Re: Help me find the Hebrews without the Bible

On May 21, 9:11 pm, imipak <imi...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On May 21, 5:32 pm, Inabón Yunes <bori...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Are you going to help me find the Hebrews without the Bible, or not?

I'm looking. I'm a software engineer, not a miracle worker. (Apologies
to all trekkies out there.) If I find something, I'll say. Equally, if
I find nothing, I'll say that too. You don't need to worry about me
being coy if the results don't match up to any particular expectation.

Software engineer? Wow, I pictured you as a retired college proffesor.
Go figure...Good for you....you are doing great :)


Give me something I can work on, too many wikipedia link.

Because we don't know the pronunciation in many of the languages from
back then, that's not as easy as it sounds. How can either of us be
certain if any given word is a match or not? However, there are some
things we know about Semitic languages and their soundings, so if (and
it is an if) there is a match, it is more likely than not that we
would be able to determine that.

If you are going to help me, please give me something verifiable.  any *.edu will do.

No problem.

Now, really, tell me how in the hell you get from Apiru to Hebrew again?  That was all I had to read to stop and
just check your references.  Didn't help much!

Hey, ancient languages are the province of very few extremely
brilliant specialists for a reason, and that reason is that languages
are ill-behaved over these sorts of timescales. Take the Old English
word "Alfwine". It translates in modern English to "Elf-Friend". Only
the first component carried forward, the a becoming ae and eventually
becoming an e. The second component didn't survive. The whole process
took about 1,000 years.

The word "hebrew" might easily have been 3,000+ years old by the time
it got written down in the form we know it today. The mix of phonetic
drift and linguistic changes on such a timescale are way way outside
of my league to calculate. I rely heavily on the experts in the field
to say what is a viable root and what isn't. If the experts in Middle
Eastern philology say that Apiru is a viable root for Hebrew, I can
say (and indeed did in my post) that it's controversial and far from
clear, but it simply isn't for me to tell those philologists that I
know better than they.

I draw two lines that I will NOT cross. I will NOT tell you that a
translation is more certain than the experts acknowledge it to be and
I will NOT tell you that a translation is more certain than I feel the
experts have any business claiming it to be. (ie: I am prepared to be
less certain than an expert, but never more so.)

I will do my best to help you, but I am not prepared to invent facts
where no facts exist -- whether those facts be positive, negative or
neutral.

.

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