Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Hanbrew

I have no idea why, but the urge struck me to write Ancient Hebrew in Hangul.  I miss Korea sometimes.

Modern Hebrew has erased all the distinctions between emphatic and non-emphatic consonants, so there may be some surprises for you there.  I tried to keep things as close to Hebrew and Korean as possible, but the palatal series has to become pharyngeal.  The alveolar fricative series needed an emphatic and the palatal didn't, so ㅊ got stolen to become /ts/.  The labials stops don't need an emphatic in Hebrew (unlike Ge'ez) so ㅍ became ש.  I would've prefered the + under the ㄹ to be joined to it, but I was already stretching Unicode far beyond what it was intended to do.
י and ו got their own special treatment a la Hangul: the ø onset consonant marker (which I'd already hijacked to be the glottal stop) doubles as the place-holder for the Korean way of indicating diphthongs.  Fortunately, I didn't have to worry about /wu/ and /wo/ coming up in Hebrew, so the lack of forms in Korean didn't hurt me any.  /ɰi/ became /wə/ and I had to add slashed to create /ji/ and /jə/.  Otherwise, it should all be pretty intuitive.  I'm too tired to figure out how to add dageshes, sin and shin dots except by hand!  Reduced vowels and full-vs.-defective spelling rules need not apply.

Here's Genesis 1:1 in Hebrew:

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ.

and here it is in Hanbrew:

쁘랭핃 뻐렁 에로̟힘 앧 하퍼마임̅ 의앧허어렟.

(I included the coda glottal stops because I think they were pronounced in Paleo-Hebrew).

1 comment:

  1. Then - of course - I found out that the stupid exception-to-everything verb חוה does have /wu/ and /wo/ in the 3cp yaqtol and jussive. :-(

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