Carthaginians speaks Hebrew?

[Ibrahim]

that's it-nobody attacks Hax, and gets away with it:

@bar khoba: get over it. and Hax referred to Polybios as being the most reliable historian around. he never said polybios discussed the bible-for all we know, he gave it about as much attention as he'd give an ant-none. his history was also about his timeperiod, not the biblical era.

and: religion=/= science, and science=/=religion. just because you happen to believe in the torah as a matter of faith, does not make it an actual historical book, no more so than my faith as a muslim makes a qur'an an actual historical book. i'm not saying its all myth (its based on history afterall), but these books were not intended to lecture on history, only to show the grandure of God. 'nuff said. if you don't get me by now, I suggest you stop arguing with the EB team...


also, If you must know a conclusive answer: yes, phoenician really is supposed to sound like Hebrew, and visca versa. the main differeces are(you don't have to read this, I added it to enlighten..EB may know more:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

1-hebrew(no not modern hebrew) retains the p- sound; phoenician, like arabic, shifted to an f by the EB timeframe. e.g shufet.. if an ancient hebrew read the phoenician shufet (ruling body), he'd say: shopet...

1-long a in proto semetic=> long o in hebrew, but long u in punic. shufet/ shopet, rus/ros (e.g. russadir, morocco). stressed a in proto semetic changed to a short o in punic, a wierd looking a in hebrew (blame IPA-rendered it an wierd a)

2-somewhat differing vocab. (duh?)
yeah, I'll confess, I used the same sources EB did(minus correspondance with khramallov), plus i looked into the way the romani rendered punic words(hebrew, latin, and phoenician had the same number of vowels apparently, and the same types of vowels-if you can get the hebrew cognate, consonents are easy). you can shoot me...

if they happen to have the same vocabulary, that's because they are of the same exact part of the semetic family branch; the north westrn semetic section, hebraic (or canaanite) sub-branch of that. the diff. between them is roughly the same as that between a kuwaiti's arabic, and moroccan (I could use maltese, but the vocab is 60 non-semetic). neither can really understand the other, and would require a translator...I'm referring to the spoken language, not the written.

3-do not think that modern hebrew can be used to accuratly assese another language of the semetic branch; in the attempt to revive it, several non semetic sounds were inrtroduced, to ease pronunciation to a yiddish/slavic audience, and many semetic ones were dropped, e.g, the 3ayn (IIRC, its like a glottal stop in modern hebrew), the sad (emphatic s-now rendered ts), the ta'(emphatic t-god knows what the heck happened to it), and the ha' (merged into kha'). ha' refers no to the h- sound, but to a pharyngeal sound. the fact that they (the letter representing those sounds)are even used in the bible proves that the modern pronunciation, lexicon, and some parts of grammar is nothing like trhat of ancient hebrew; only the vocabulary, morphology, and general syntax are intact. and don't get me started on v...you know modern hebrew is the only semetic tongue conclusively shown to have a v- sound, in native form? I looked all over, and only found it to have a v- sound
here is the IPA info (its off wikipedia, but, I can back it up at a moment's notice-or, since you speak it, you can see for yourself):

The pairs /b, v/, /k, x/ and /p, f/ have historically been allophonic. In Modern Hebrew, however, all six sounds are phonemic, due to mergers involving formerly distinct sounds (/v/ merging with /w/, /k/ merging with /q/, /x/ merging with /ħ/), loss of consonant gemination (which formerly distinguished the stop members of the pairs from the fricatives when intervocalic), and the introduction of syllable-initial /f/ through foreign borrowings.

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