I would qualify your “very unlikely” with something like “based on known ancient Semitic linguistic processes.” In my original article, I gave three reasons why there are other processes at play that make this more of an unknown wild card situation.

Randy,
You are assuming that Jared and his crew were speaking Adamic originally, which isn’t an assumption that we have to make.

Attic thalatta sea
Ionic thalassa sea

Attic glotta tongue
Ionic glossa tongue

Attic tettares four
Ionic tessares four

Admittedly, in this case the -tt- and the -ss- are both alveolars, and we have an extensive literature in both dialects to study, so we have some understanding of the linguistic development. But what if all we had were Attic literature, and a single rogue occurrence of thalassa? It wouldn’t be so easy to figure out what was going on, but we wouldn’t reject the authenticiy of the rogue orthography; we would start from the assumption there was a good linguistic reason for it.

Yes, that the b and s are different classes of consonant complicates the linguistics considerably. I agree with that. But as Nibley showed, Arabic (a Semitic language) daftar also appears as dastar, and that is a change that didn’t take thousands of years to happen.

I think it is possible that there is a linguistic process at work here that we simply do not understand.

The “no time for deep stuff” bit reminds me of a Fox Trot comic strip that reran in the paper the other day. It originally ran on Nov. 11, 2003.

Jason is going to pass a football, and tells Marcus to “go deep.” Marcus responds with a paradox on free will and preordination [the kind we often debate in the 'Nacle]. “Too deep,” says Jason. So Marcus comes back with “If Batman died, would the Joker be happy?”