[Mesorah] Hoshanot: Samech vs Sin

[Mandel, Seth]

It is quite complicated.  But my point was that in Massoretic Hebrew, sin and samekh were two different spellings for the exact same thing, and also according to the Babylonian and EY tradition of vocalization.
So it should be NO surprise that as far back as the G'onim, any words that began with the /s/ sound were considered to come alphabetically before the  ‘ayin, regardless of how they may be spelled in the T'NaKh, and that from the time of the G'onim (and certainly before) words were spelled with a samekh and not a sin.
The point was that historically, there certainly were 3 different sounds, but by historical times (i.e. the beginning of a written  record), all Semitic languages that we know of had only two. This applies even to ancient  Akkadian. It is just that different languages collapsed the three into two in different ways, and the consonantal spelling of the T'NaKh reflects a language where samekh was different from the shin, which represented one sound, as it did in Phoenician and northern spoken Hebrew  as evidence by the story about sibboleth (that also applies to the Samaritan pronunciation of Hebrew, because they, surprise surprise, were from the north of Israel). In their reading, shin and sin are pronounced the same, but different than samekh.
So do not worry about the history. As far as Jewish Hebrew goes, sin and samekh were the same, going back to the time of the First Temple in the South.

Rabbi Dr. Seth Mandel
________________________________
From: Akiva Miller <akivagmiller at gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 27, 2019 3:42 PM
To: Mandel, Seth <mandels at ou.org>
Cc: mesorah at aishdas.org <mesorah at aishdas.org>
Subject: Re: [Mesorah] Hoshanot: Samech vs Sin

RSM wrote a lot of fascinating stuff, of which I'll quote just a small piece:

<<<  In standard Hebrew and Aramaic, B and C (the ones written by sin and samekh) became identical. In Arabic, the ones written by A and C became identical. In Phoenician and Northern Hebrew, the ones written by A and B became identical.
Hebrewuses an alphabet developed in the north and Phoenicia, so we have the same letter for two different sounds, distinguished by the Massoretes by dots. And Biblical Hebrew uses the old spelling, even though it does not show the pronunciation.  >>>

Can you give approximate dates for these developments? Words like "Phoenicia" make it sound like very long ago, while the piyyutum we've mentioned seem to be relatively recent. How long did these changes remain in flux? It is difficult for me to imagine that the author of Kel Adon felt it natural to alphabetize "smeichin" between nun and ayin.

(I know that I'm asking you to dumb down decades of study, and I apologize for that, but what can I do? Torah hee, ul'lamda ani tzarich.)


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