Diachronics

I've recently joined the Language Creation Society, and I hope to have a website up soon, though I have very much enjoyed Frathwiki's hospitality.  The size of this undertaking is quickly getting away from me, to the point where I don't think I would've begun, had I known!  Let me bring you up to speed on the ever-blurring line between fact and fiction.

First, what is true.
The Hebrew Bible - as we have it in the Massoretic Text tradition - is a hypothetical reconstruction of what actually pronounced.  This is not to say that we don't have an accurate transmission of the original text.  But the Semitic abjads until ca. 700 A.D. are just that, adjads.  That is, they record the consonants and not the vowels.  The Massorites (that school of copyists who follow Ben-Asher and his particular system of vowels and other marks) did their best guess as to what had been pronounced by their ancestors before Aramaic had swept in an irrevocably altered their language.  Even stranger, there are historical layers and dialects preserved in the original consonantal text which even different original speakers would've found perplexing.  Also, as the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown, tiny variations in spelling had crept in from the exile until the foundations of the various schools of pointing arose.

All of this intrique leads to a great deal of difficulty in reconstructing what Paleo/Proto/Early Hebrew sounded like.  This is layer of Hebrew is (consonantally) preserved in Genesis 49, Exodus 15, Numbers 23-24, Deuteronomy 32-33, Judges 5, Psalms 18 and 68.  The next layer - called Early Biblical Hebrew - comes in two flavors.  In the North of Israel, there is greater preservation of the spoken form of the common people, but uncommon influence of Phoenician.  In the South of Judah, there is a great literary style which perserve older form, but is influenced by literary styles of the upper crust societies from around the Fertile Crescent at the time, especially Akkadian.  Here, the Psalm of Habakkuk is exhibit A.  Next, as the exile(s) began, Aramaic became entrenched as the lingua franca of the day and all the Jews/Israelites were bilingual.  Unfortunately for our reconstruction, the Aramaic idea of mater lectionis becomes very prominent now, at the same time as a plethora of sound changes are modifying the Hebrew of the people's faulty memory.

Now, for the fiction.
I am imagining a group of mixed people from the Levant  - but predominantly Hebrews - leaving ca. 1000 B.C. for the Philippines.  There are several waves of immigration before a Hittite and a Sabean scholar show up.  The people are in danger of being completely assimilated into the Proto-Malayo/Austronesian language around them.  But some of them remembered the old ways and speech, but these two rallied them around the cause of written language, a unique claim-to-fame for these workers in an illiterate society.  These two "crafted" a language pastiche that could be understood by all the people together.  Then, a curious thing happened: the prophet Jonah came to them and reunited the people around YHWH, the god of non-Hebrews too.
Through the end of the 8th century B.C., this community received news from as far afield as Spain, copying and redacted Scripture to suit their brand of theology.  They played a crucial role as Scribes to the balangay of the Philippines, keeping all records carved on bamboo and tree-bark.  Only in a secret cave did they write on clay, and even that wasn't fired.  Only a collection of tablets and ostra from the end of their time (near 100 B.C.) survived, vast though it was.


So, my task is vast.  Reconstruct what I think the Paleo-Hebrew texts of the Bible were, transmogrify them into an Ancient Filippino setting, write them in Japanese characters.  Awesome!