Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Translating - some elementary questions

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Translating - some elementary questions
  • Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 19:56:27 +0000

On 10/1/06, Peter Kirk wrote:
On 01/10/2006 08:45, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
> ...
> Having actually looked up evidence now, I need to correct that above
> explanation. Like the "long a to o" shift, Phoenician had a similar shift
in
> "short a". Hebrew probably did too. The qamats represents those situations
> that "short a" became "o" among others. Under Arabic influence, those
"short
> a" cases that became "o" were now read as "a" again.
>
>
Yitzhak, are you really claiming that all cases of qamats in Masoretic
Hebrew were always pronounced as "o" and not "a" until after the time of
the Masoretes?

In the Massoretic tradition, yes. In fact, it is not only what I
claim, it is what
modern linguists claim. For example, Geoffrey Khan, in "Tiberian Hebrew
Phonology" in Phonologies of Asia and Africa (1997) identifies qamets as
being phonetically realized as "back, half-open rounded", and then identifies
it as Unicode +0254 (A sort of upside down, backwards e, without the bar).
He later spells the pronounciation of "ship" )NYH as "?enij'je:", where e
represents Unicode 254.

This is an improbably claim, as is surely demonstrated by
transliterations as "a" into Greek, Latin and other languages, from say
3rd century BCE (LXX) to 4th century CE (Jerome).

That could be explained, and probably is to be explained, as dialect
differences. We know that the Greek/Latin transcriptions do represent
a dialectical variant from Tiberian Hebrew.

For example, if the
names of Hebrew Bible characters which ended in -YH or -YHW, with qamats
under the yod, were pronounced -yo or -yohu in Hebrew of this period,
why do the Greek and Latin forms of their names uniformly end in -AS and
not -OS? Many more such examples could be given.

Why do the Greek and Latin forms consistenly end the 2nd m.s. suffix without
a vowel? The dialect model can also explain the Sefardi pronounciation, of
course, but it still appears to be to be a later back-formation from an
original
"o" sound, as can be deduced from words like "yamim" (days), where the
qamets represents a contracted "aw > o" sound change that occurs uniformly
in the NWS transcriptions of the 2nd Millenium BCE, including Ugaritic.

Yitzhak Sapir




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page