Hi Dave. I just wanted to note that over the years I've not trusted the research at ancient-hebrew.org which you quote, especially when it comes to etymology and letter-meanings. The site includes some absurd edenics that tenuously connects Modern English to Hebrew roots, while he justifies Hebrew roots as the sum of their letter meanings .
I agree with your concerns in general, but I thought that the page I mentioned did a good job explaining the "dangling" nature of delet.
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Fantastic - I'm so pleased to have found your blog. I teach a beginning level of this with Hebrew calligraphy & sofrut, so am enjoying your writing very much. Thanks!
I'm glad you enjoy it. I hope I have enough to write about each letter...
The letter dalet alternates with zayin - (נדר and נזר)
Does this have anything to do with the z/dh correspondence to Arabic (e.g. ذک dhikr* ("remembrance"), corresponding to Hebrew זכר zékher?
* No, I can't read Arabic; I cut and pasted that. :o)
It seems that Proto-Semitic is theorised to have had a dental d sound which transformed into different sounds in different languages. Hebrew absorbed it into zayin, Aramaic into dalet, and Arabic retains it as dh, for which a letter was added to the Arabic alphabet ontop of the basic 22 from Phoenecian.
Whether this has anything to do with the interchangeability of zayin and dalet in Hebrew is not clear. Zayin and dalet can interchange naturally anyway: the only difference between them is frication. But Hebrew could also have borrowed one from a dialect/language that pronounced the same word differently and gave it a slightly different meaning.
Great analysis!
An interesting (but modern)insight regarding the Chassidic tradition to pronounce Dalet as "Daled". There is an Old English word: "Thine" which has a German counterpart "Dein". Thus the phonetic connection of the T & Th sound to the "D" sound.
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