[b-hebrew] Was Schewa really silent?
Jason Hare
jaihare at gmail.com
Thu Sep 20 19:38:00 EDT 2007
Isaac,
First, I did not say Xa:GiYGfH (festival, celebration). I used |
(vertical bar) as a divider between XfG- and -GfH to represent the
division between the parts.
Perhaps, "pencil" was a bad example for the demonstration of /ə/. How
about the word "vertical" above? The syllable -cal contains a /ə/ that
is very clear. Try to pronounce the word vertical with an "a" vowel,
either /ɑ/ or /æ/, and you will see that it doesn't work. The sound
produced there is very obviously *not* an "a." It is /ə/, which is the
same sound that many of us hear in "pencil."
It is also the sound we hear at the end of "nation" : /'ne.ʃən/. To most
of us, this sound very naturally exists in both English and in Hebrew.
Many now pronounce /ə/ as a full vowel, though, as you have stated. This
is another issue entirely. All phonologists agree that /ə/ exists and is
used regularly.
Jason Hare
English Teacher
Wall Street Institute (WSI)
Rishon Lezion, Israel
Isaac Fried wrote:
> Jason,
>
> First, it is XAG GAH, '[she] celebrated', not XAGIGAH, 'feast'.
> The question, of course, it what constitutes a "vowel". A consonant
> has breadth and may include some faint, involuntary, miniscule vocal
> aftershocks, depending on its situation in a word. Articulating 'B' by
> itself I do hear the sound of air resonating in my mouth even as it is
> being ejected between my spread lips. But in the combination BG the
> sound of this trailing puff of air is absorbed in the G and it becomes
> BGADIM to my ear. It is possible that some people hear "something", to
> wit: "the shortest and quickest to pronounce vowel available to the
> human vocal system", between the 's' and the 'l' of pensəl because
> this is how they articulate it. As said, I cannot hear this whisper of
> the grass, this, audible to some, $IRAT HA(ASABIM. We need to keep
> also in mind that the distance between hearing something and dreaming
> of hearing it is very short [I am ignorant of the essentials of the
> science of psychophonetics, but am occasionally reproached that I hear
> only what I want to hear].
> To convince myself that something indeed hides between the 's' and the
> 'l' of pensəl I would have to record the word, pass it through an
> oscilloscope, observe the Fourier wave decomposition of each of its
> components and analyze its frequency and amplitude content. But I will
> not do it since I am not interested in this esoteric science of
> phonetics, which, I admit, should be nevertheless of great interest to
> scientists working on computer speech recognition.
> In any event, this discussion of the microscopic nature of this
> metaphysical ə is irrelevant to Hebrew. As you know, a Hebrew speaker
> overriding a schwa does it now by a premeditated, full-fledged vowel
> and not by an incidental squeak. Thus, the question is if it should be
> ,BGADIM, 'clothes', or B[E]GADIM, the same as M[E]GADIM, 'sweets,
> gifts of the earth', is now commonly articulated.
> I think that the pause in MacCoots is long and deliberate.
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