From: Jim Allan (jallan@smrtytrek.com)
Date: Mon Dec 29 2003 - 16:15:55 EST
Peter Kirk wrote:
> Jim, you seem to be almost contradicting yourself here. In fact it is by
> no means certain that there were separate Hebrew and Phoenician
> languages at the time of the Gezer calendar (9th century BCE? - from
> memory). At least they may have been no more different than British and
> American English. They did gradually grow apart. But at the start they
> were one.
At that time indeed they would *likely* have been close enough to be
considered mere dialects of each other, depending on how you define a
dialect and how you define a language.
The Gezer Calendar is something that some scholars have fought over
rather futilely as to whether it is written in Phoenician or Hebrew or
some other related language/dialect.
See
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-hebrew/2000-February/006723.html
for a summary that I think fits recent tendencies to let such matters lie.
Jim Allan
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