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Maria, isn't 'ch' standard Neo-Punic orthography in Latin script, even in initial positions (Krahmalkov 2001 p.22)? Doesn't that, in conjunction with the Greek, suggest that the Phoenician spelling (like the Hebrew spelling) is hiding a richer (or at least altered) phonology, at least by Hellenistic times? The same Greek spelling also appears in the Septuagint.

John Leake
Open University

On 17 Apr 2013, at 09:06, miriam bianco <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


Dear all,
I am Maria Bianco and I studied Phoenician in Rome with Professor Maria Giulia Amadasi at University of Rome La Sapienza.
I am now PhD student in Montpellier, under the direction of E. Perrin Saminadayar and C. Bonnet (Toulouse), working on the epigraphic evidence of contacts and interctions between Greeks and Phoenicians.
I just would like to propose some considerations.

In the Bible text the attested forms are KNʻN « Canaan » and KNʻNY « Cannanite ». The Greek form is Χαναναῖος and the Latin one is Chananaeus. The Hebrew and, surely, Phoenician consonants are observed in both Greek and Latin transcriptions, according to the rules observed and described in the grammar of Friedrich for this type of transition : from 2nd century B. C. the voiceless velar of the Phoenician [k] corresponds to the Greek and Latin voiced velar [kh].
If you read the chapter of St. Augustine, you can note that the author establishes a kind of equation :
tria : salus = Chananaei : *Chanani. The word connector for this equation is unde « from which, whence ».
In my opinion, Augustine also gives us the solution, the key to read this equation : the corruption of a single letter (corrupta scilicet sicut in talibus solet una littera). We must be sure of the lesson transmitted *Chanani (which are the other lectiones in the manuscript tradition?) to exclude that the corruptio concerns a consonant (KNN). Alternatively, as the text is delivered, the question seems to concern the final-vowel sequence - aei (it is the only element changing fromChanani to Chananaei), which certainly may have been facilitated by the phoneticism Phoenician-Punic that provides a suffix yod for the ethnics.

Kind regards,
Maria Bianco