Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Al Silberman <alfred.silberman AT lmco.com>]

On Tue, 25 Aug 1998  Vincent DeCaen <decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca> wrote:

> I guess this means I'm getting through. :-)

Not really.  :-)

>oh, come now. are you going to refute the scholarship based on the
>masoretic schools' treatises themselves? on the testimony of
>contemporaries 1000-1200? I don't see how you could refute this
>argumentation and evidence.

This statement is ambiguous and I hope it dosn't say what I think it says.
I base my knowledge and statements regarding Tiberian pronunciation on the
statements made by Jewish Grammarians of the 10th through 14th centuries -
people who still were familiar with the actual Tiberian sounds. Are you
saying that a University Professor sitting in his office today has a better
handle on how things were pronounced 1000 years ago than the people
themselves who were doing the pronouncing?

>
>your reading is based on a five-point system. the Tiberian is
>seven-point. you therefore get these systematic mismatch problems.

At the end of the post you say:

>
>I'm sorry you take such a dim view of scholarship. Kahn's work is
>**impeccable**. it is not possible to do better.
>

Ooops, I am sorry. Did I forget to mention that one of the papers that I
tried to digest was written by you?

Let us see what you have to say there.

>1.1. Tiberian Hebrew is not Arabic nor Akkadian. There is no
>reason to assume a priori that underlying representations are
>identical either with Arabic or Akkadian. Goerwitz (1993) is
>fully justified in rejecting the resulting byzantine analyses,
>traditional or generative, that attempt to derive Tiberian Hebrew
>forms from such a basis.

So, the "impeccable" studies of many linguists who tried to convince us
that Hebrew is a three point vowel system just like Arabic are to be
discarded! Well, I agree with you that the three point hypothesis was
nonsense.

>
>
>1.3. This paper outlines a preliminary sketch of the four-vowel
>hypothesis for Tiberian Hebrew phonology.

Well, we have now progressed to a four point system. Good, going in my
direction. But now you say that "the Tiberian is seven-point". Somehow, I
missed the intervening stages where you went from a four point to a seven
point system.  In any case, I apparently got left behind since you say that
"your reading is based on a five-point system".

Funny, all along I thought that I had distinct pronunciations for eight of
the ten vowel signs. But I will have to disabuse myself of that silly
notion because a Professor in Toronto - who has never heard me pronounce
Hebrew - KNOWS that I only use five.

> the
>hallmark of the Tiberian tradition was that it accurately kept qametz
>and seghol pure and distinct. see Chiesa's extensive documentation.

Where did segol come from in this discussion? That would have been
appropriate if the three point Arabic system were assumed for this
discussion - which it is not.

>
>but the point is that no living dialects and reading traditions are in
>a direct line of descent from the *Tiberian*.

I am in complete agreement with that statement. There were many dialects in
existence at that time. Differing traditions today are a reflection of
differing traditions at that time. I also believe that "anomalies" in the
MT pointing may simply be a reflection of other existing traditions.

< snip >

> everyone attests to the consistent and accurate reading of qametz
> as open o in the Tiberian tradition.

Everyone ??? Absolutely not true. To throw another wrinkle into the
terminology confusion, the earliest grammarians referred to what we today
call a zere as a qametz qatan.

>that's sad. are you saying you're turning your back on scholarship
>because your reading tradition is not identical to the original?

Of course not. What I am saying is that I haven't seen scholarship in this
area that I feel is trustworthy. As I said, I think that there has been too
little field work and a lot of conjecture.