Hebrew Voices #182 – The Man Who Taught His Children Ancient Greek: Part 1

March 13, 2024

In this episode of Hebrew Voices, The Man Who Taught His Children Ancient Greek: Part 1, Nehemia joins Cambridge University lecturer Dr. Benjamin Kantor to discuss using manuscript errors and transcriptions to reconstruct old Greek and Hebrew pronunciations.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices, The Man Who Taught His Children Ancient Greek: Part 1, Nehemia joins Cambridge University lecturer Dr. Benjamin Kantor to discuss using manuscript errors and transcriptions to reconstruct old Greek and Hebrew pronunciations.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Hebrew Voices #182 – The Man Who Taught His Children Ancient Greek: Part 1

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: So, this was like a profound realization I had in my undergrad at Hebrew University. We were learning Phoenician epigraphy; that was the name of the class, Introduction to Epigrafia Kna’anit or something like this, yeah, Canaanite. And the professor said, “Here’s the Shin, and in this inscription is pronounced ‘th’, but here, from 200 years later, it was pronounced ‘sh’.” And somebody raised their hand and very innocently asked, “How do you know that?” And he didn’t have an answer.

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Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Benjamin Kantor, who is a post-doc researcher at University of Cambridge in Biblical Hebrew Philology, and he did his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you, Dr. Kantor, for being here with us.

Dr. Kantor: Yes. Thank you for having me.

Nehemia: Yeah. I saw you give a talk at the SBL a few years back, and I’m like, this is amazing stuff, what you’re doing. This is the kind of thing that I dreamed one day could be done, and essentially, you’re doing it. What I understood you to be doing is reconstructing the pronunciation of ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew. And that’s amazing because, look, I deal with a lot of people who… and we’ll talk about the letter Vav, hopefully we’ll have time to. I love the letter Vav. But they’ll say, “You know, Nehemia, you pronounce Hebrew with Vav, and that’s because your ancestors came from Europe and you’re really just speaking Yiddish, because there is no Vav in ancient Hebrew,” meaning a “v” sound.

Dr. Kantor: Sure, sure.

Nehemia: And I’m going to use these… I’m trying to use terms that everyone understands. We’ll talk later about bilabial stops and bilabial fricatives and labiodental fricatives, and you explain what that is. So, the “v” sound versus the “w” sound. And then you’ll get people who will say, “Well, you know, when we read Hebrew, we do the ancient Hebrew.” And then it’s just like a made-up thing.