[B-Greek] Hebrew-Greek transliteration

Stephen C. Carlson scarlson at mindspring.com
Wed Oct 5 11:26:56 EDT 2005


Dmitriy Reznik wrote:
>Here is the question. I noticed that e.g. Chavvah
>in Hebrew is transliterated in LXX and NT as EUA
>(Eve), and Chanoch is transliterated as ENOC. Do
>you know the reason for substituting the Hebrew
>chet with the Greek E, though Greek has the letter
>C which sounds more appropriate?

Robert Steiner's article in the summer issue of JBL
gives some background about this.  Briefly, the
Hebrewletter chet was used to record two different
sounds: (1) a voiceless uvular fricative and (2) a
voiceless pharyngeal fricative.  When the first sound
was transliterated into Greek, it generally was rendered
with a chi, sometimes a kappa.  On the other hand,
the second source was transliterated with zero or
a vowel.

Stephen Carlson

--
Stephen C. Carlson, 
mailto:scarlson at mindspring.com 
"Poetry speaks of aspirations, and songs chant the words."  Shujing 2.35



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