Originally Posted by spin

I think you mean, you should enunciate your reasons.


You would have been clearer had you said you would consider material that is transliterated rather than translated, which is obvious.


You need in passing to see how they handle the phonological issues, otherwise you have little to gauge your analysis by. We find the notion that Tsade is transliterated as sigma in all common names. This sets up a standard for an oral influence behind the written text. Obviously, you must exclude these as your special plea would be lost.


We have a lot of infrequently used names rendered in the LXX. Of those featuring a Tsade, the great majority of them return a sigma in Greek. I can understand why you won't consider these, as they won't help you avoid the linguistic issue.


I can expect some variation as the Greek is confronted by a strange name, but we see from the earlier case, the Greek will tend to render a Tsade as a sigma anyway.

As to the name of the town, we know from a Hebrew inscription from Caesarea Maritima that the town was called נצרת in the 3rd/4th century, not נזרת with a Zayn (=zeta). It is also the case that it was called נצרת in the Syriac Aramaic version of the gospels. The modern Arabic name for the town is an-Nașeriyya. All the evidence we have for the name of the town other than the gospels is coherent.


Understand that people with a normal English upbringing are clueless with regard to the simplicity of a phonetically based writing system. It is farcical to someone with such a writing system that English speakers have competitions about how to write words, when writing words is so obvious to them. An English speaker is simply mystified regarding phonology. One sound can be written so many ways in English. Think of "sh" in "ship" or in "sure" or "nation" or "mission" or "suspicion", etc. You need to get over your naive smoothing over of sound differences based on the lack of preparation (that a native English speaker usually gets) in order to process the linguistic evidence.

The only people who seem to have had a problem with the pronunciation of this town are Greek christians and the evidence I've put forward which you haven't deigned to consider suggests that the name of the town wasn't originally based on the Semitic town name at all.

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

Cool, spin. You said, "I can expect some variation as the Greek is confronted by a strange name, but we see from the earlier case, the Greek will tend to render a Tsade as a sigma anyway." Sorry, what earlier case are you referring to?

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

If there was a good comparison to the name of Nazareth, then that is what you would build your case upon, but I don't think there is. I think you need to make a better case that an oral lineage of largely uneducated Greek speakers, or a Greek author at the tail-end of that lineage, would preserve the pronunciation of the name of an otherwise unknown Galilean town. If you can not, then your argument seems tenuous at best.

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

... It seems like spin's argument hangs on written transmissions of phonology, but I don't think he has effectively considered variations of phonology that can easily arise from oral transmission.

Originally Posted by Toto

Watch out for "what is obvious." Linguists find regular patterns in the transmission of sounds. Have you studied linguistics?