[b-hebrew] Was Schewa really silent?
Peter Bekins
pbekins at fuse.net
Fri Sep 7 18:27:46 EDT 2007
>>Still, the most commonly cited example of a vocal shewa is
>>S'DOM,which becomes SODOM in the LXX. It's a bad example,
>>beause SD--- is an impossible start to a Greek word. (We
>>see similarly issues in the American pronunciation of "Sri Lanka."
>>Almost everyone says"Shree..." because Enlglish words cannot start
>>with the sounds SR---.)
Joel, I don't have anything constructive to add to the larger
question of vocal/silent schewa, and I agree in principle that the
Greek evidence should be taken with a grain of salt, but doesn't
Greek usually break initial consonant clusters with a prothetic
vowel? Ie, they would have pronounced it /Isdom/ or something like that?
[Sri] --> [Shri] is not quite the same thing, I haven't studied it in
detail, but at first glance this seems like an allophonic shift of
[s]-->[sh] before [r] since we Americans pronounce a retroflex [r].
If you say a flap [r] then [sri] is fine. We do allow consonant
clusters to begin with [s] in general.
Peter Bekins
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