[b-hebrew] Was Schewa really silent?

Isaac Fried if at math.bu.edu
Tue Sep 18 14:23:29 EDT 2007


James and Michael,

Thanks for the advice. But the question is not articulating the /ə/  
but just hearing it. Even listening on a good talking dictionary I  
hear nothing in 'pencil' but pensl. Possibly 's' leaves a faint,  
barely audible, trail, and 'l' a similar initial faint burst.  
Possibly it is indeed "the shortest and quickest to pronounce vowel  
available to the human vocal system", I just do not hear it, and  
certainly am not going to deliberately attempt it. In any event, I am  
not interested in the nano-phonetics of micro-second gaps and milli- 
decibel sighs. The sound-laboratory science of the ephemerally  
sonant /ə/ looks to me esoteric and irrelevant to the issue at hand.  
As I said, when a present-day Hebrew speaker "moves" a schwa he does  
it forcefully and to the fullest extent of the vowel. The bottom line  
is that there is in my opinion no such thing as a vocal schwa in  
Hebrew. I think Hebrew sounds crisper and more esthetic without the  
extra schwa "NA" E's. I have never encountered an instance where a  
word is unpronounceable without resorting to a schwa mobile.
I think it is so:
1. The nakdanim placed the schwas to avoid vacancies and block  
thereby latter unauthorized additions.
2. The meaning of the word schwa appears to me to refer to the fact  
that the sign is vertical, NICAB, in contrast with the tsere that is  
SARU(A, 'spread out'. I can hardly believe the often heard claim that  
the name schwa refers to 'nothing'.
3. The schwa is to be pronounced as the word $WA itself is  
pronounced, with $ abutting W.
4. Occasionally a thin cleavage is helpful, but never an E. Thus, it  
should be XAG[ ]GAH, '[she] celebrated', not XAG[E]GAH. If I am not  
mistaken the English pronounce MacCoots as Mac[ ]Coots, not Mac[E]Coots.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

On Sep 17, 2007, at 11:15 AM, biblical hebrew wrote:

> Hi Isaac,
>
> the sound which you are failing to hear in the final syllable of  
> pencil is the sound I was talking about. It is the shortest and  
> quickest to pronounce vowel available to the human vocal system and  
> is the kind of 'uh' sound you make when you sit up on the side of  
> the bed after a heavy night. It is the sound you make at the end of  
> every single English consonant when pronounced out of context. Try  
> pronouncing 'b', 'd', 'f', 'g', 'h' etc. out of the natural context  
> of a word. Are you starting to notice a similarity yet? That sound  
> that comes at the end of each of them is the vowel in question. And  
> it is this very vowel that enables us to speak English so quickly  
> and which makes spoken English so darn difficult to follow for  
> students of English whose language does not have such a lazy vowel.
>
> But this brings us on to the following question. Were the  
> Massoretes as phonetically aware as modern formalisms of phonetics?  
> Or was what they called a silent schewa just as silent as you  
> believe your 'tiny gaps' to  be?  i.e. very much vocal?
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> --------
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> --------
>
> James Christian Read - BSc Computer Science
>
> http://www.lamie.org/hebrew       Thesis 1 - Aleppo codex machine  
> translation
> http://www.lamie.org/lad-sim.doc  Thesis 2 - language acquisition  
> simulation
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> --------
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> --------
>
>
> On 9/17/07, Isaac Fried <if at math.bu.edu> wrote:
> James,
>
> I am sorry, but I am not succeeding in phonetically relating to  
> this graphical symbol /ə/, which indeed all say "is the most common  
> sound in the English language". Listening even to a good talking  
> dictionary I hear nothing in 'hard' but hard, and nothing in  
> 'pencil' but pensl. I would not know what to do with pensəl. Is / 
> ə/ indicating that there exists an ephemeral, tiny-tiny, ether  
> filled, gap between the 's' and the 'l', or is /ə/ just standing  
> there in memoriam of an evaporated 'i'?
>
>



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