![]() ![]() While Prideaux noted that the Old Hebrew alphabet was the same as the Samaritan alphabet, he also pointed out that it is identical to the Phoenician alphabet. Old Hebrew and the Phoenician Alphabetįigure 5 – A portion of a text from a Phoenician inscription The Hebrew Torah (Pentateuch) was originally written with an alphabet similar to that of the Samaritans, but after the Exile in Babylon it was transcribed with the Chaldean square alphabet, which was still used 1,000 years ago for the Aleppo Codex and is still used today in modern Hebrew. This same theory is presented in the 1831 edition of the Encyclopedia Americana "During the Babylonish captivity, they received from the Chaldees the square character in common use and in the time Ezra, the old Hebrew manuscripts were copied in Chaldee characters." ![]() Humphrey Prideaux also writes in 1799 "And these five books still have among them, written in the old Hebrew or Phoenician character, which was in use among them before the Babylonish captivity, and in which both these and all other scriptures were written, till Ezra transcribed them into that of the Chaldeans." According to the Samaritans themselves and Hebrew scholars, this alphabet is the original "Old Hebrew" alphabet.Įven as far back as 1691, this connection between the Samaritan and the "Old" Hebrew alphabets was made by Henry Dodwell " still preserve in the Old Hebrew characters." The Torah Scroll of the Samaritans use an alphabet that is very different from the one used on Jewish Torah Scrolls. The Samaritans are, according to themselves, the descendants of the Northern Tribes of Israel that were not sent into Assyrian captivity, and have continuously resided in the land of Israel. ![]() Hartwell continues: "But the most decisive confirmation of this point is to be found in ancient Hebrew coins, which were struck before the captivity, and even engraven on all of them are manifestly the same with the modern Samaritan." In 1854, Thomas Hartwell wrote "The present Hebrew Characters, or Letters, are twenty two in number, and of a square form: but the antiquity of these letters is a point that has been most severely contested by many learned men."įigure 2 – Judean Half Shekel (Image courtesy of Classical Numismatic Group, Inc.) However, history suggests that these Hebrew letters are not the same Hebrew letters used in antiquity. The mention of the Hebrew alphabet brings to mind the Hebrew letters that are familiar to many today that are used in Torah scrolls, Hebrew Bibles and even in Modern Hebrew Books and Newspapers. Benner Old Hebrew and the Samaritan Alphabet I'm a native English speaker living in Israel, if that helps justify my skepticism.By Jeff A. There is a fairly well defined translation set in Rabbinic literature believe it or not, the validity of a Rabbinic divorce document ("get") depends on it being perfectly accurate, which means that over the past few hundred years, Rabbis have standardized which sounds get mapped to which letters, but it's often influenced by Yiddish, and has extra letters put in (alephs, mostly) which modern Israelis would find puzzling. Israel has no official standard that I've been able to find road signs regularly feature inconsistent transliterations (from Hebrew to English, but I've seen it backwards as well) Even if you want to translate phonetic sounds to Hebrew, you'll still have some issues to contend with (taf vs. Hebrew transliteration of English is not trivial (because of the ambiguities in English, rather than Hebrew: the Hebrew is actually well defined). You'll need to define your requirements better. Many languages (especially English) have very complicated and irregular pronounciation rules (in the case of English apparently totally random*) and there is never an exact one-to-one relationship between writing systems (if it is you're probably talking about a symbol font not an actual writing system), so unless you have tought your computer to speak both languages fluently there's not much chance of automatic transliteration. ![]() You could of course just arbitarily select one of the symbols that could represent a sound in both languages, but this wil (undoubtedly) yeld hillarius results, and will probably not be much helpful. When transliterating you must base the transliteration on phonetics not the quirks of the other writing system, so the transliterator must essentially know both languages to some degree, and teaching a computer to understand languages verbally is still probably far into the future. This is because names change slower than the writing system, wich allso changes slower than the verbal language. I'll guess that's next to impossible, I don't know hebrew, but I do know from other languages that the pronounciation (and thus the transliteration) peoples names often (actually more often than not) differs a lot from the general pronounciation of the letters. ![]()
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