[Mesorah] Why is the guy's name Bigsan and not Bigtan?

[Mandel, Seth via Mesorah]

Actually, your husband hit on a signficant issue.  To wit: when Aramaic borrowed words from Persian, it kept the Persian pronunciation.  Perhaps this was because Persian and Aramaic were very close in their range of sounds.  Persian had (and still does have) sounds like the ones written gh, kh, and th, which exactly (as far as we can tell) corresponded to the soft g, k, and t in Aramaic and Hebrew.

Consider a word such as ????????, which occurs multiple times in Daniel, always with a soft g (and that is the way it is in the Targum, as shown in all the old mss. and in Teimani pronunciation until today).  In a Hebrew word, a gimel with a dagesh qal would be expected.  But the original Persian had a th sound and a gh sound, and the Aramaic preserved that pronunciation, even though it went against the "rules" of native Aramaic words.  (In Modern Hebrew, by which I mean 'Abazit, the language developed by Ben Yehudah, most writers put a dagesh in the gimel; but that has no historical basis).

Most of the data we have is from Aramaic borrowings from Persian, since Aramaic (specifically the form called reichs-Aramäisch) was the official language of the Persian Empire.  However, Hebrew from the time of the Persian Empire also uses a few Persian words, and they appear with the Persian pronunciation.  Including names.  Such as Bighthan, with a soft g and a soft t.  (Of course, two languages always differ somewhat, and so the Persian began words with a kshs- sound.  The Greeks didn't have that, but they had ks- and so names such as

Khshayârshâ were transcribed in Greek with a ks-, as in Xerxes, whereas Hebrew adds a proleptic vowel [the same thing as in Istadyon for Stadium] to get A-chshawerosh

?Achashwerosh.)

Full disclosure: we do not know the exact form of the Persian name.  Nevertheless, the point was that Hebrew and Aramaic kept the th- and gh- sounds in Persian.



Rabbi Dr. Seth Mandel
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From: T613K at aol.com <T613K at aol.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2016 12:16 AM
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Cc: m613k at aol.com; t613k at aol.com
Subject: Why is the guy's name Bigsan and not Bigtan?

My husband, Michael Katz, wants to know why Bigsan in the Megillah isn't Bigtan.  Why isn't there a dagesh in the sav/tav of his name?  My husband thinks that after a shva nach (under the gimel) the next letter should have a dagesh in it, as for example in the name Ester.  To me this seems a very Litvishe concern, where others might be wondering something more interesting, like who was Bigsan anyway and why did he want to bump off Achashverosh?  But never mind, we'll just stick to Mesorah territory.  Anybody know why Bigsan isn't Bigtan?  Thank you.

--Toby Katz
t613k at aol.com<mailto:t613k at aol.com>
tobykatz613 at gmail.com<mailto:tobykatz613 at gmail.com>
..
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