Biblical Hebrew Forum

["R. Hoberman" <rdhoberman AT ccmail.sunysb.edu>]

I'm a professional phonologist, accustomed to many different systems of
phonetic notation, and I know Hebrew well, but I don't know what to make
of something like w.&:m"xiym.  It's possible to transcribe in such a way
that BOTH all the details in the original are represented AND anyone who
knows the language but doesn't know the tranliteration code can tell what
you're talking about.

I'm not writing to propose a particular way of doing this, but convenient
devices could be to capitalize letters that traditionally have dot
underneath (Tet versus taw, Het versus he), capitalize certain vowels (A
versus a), and to use digraphs (such as sh for shin or th for spirantized
t; the rare occurrence of tav-shwa-he or sin-shwa-he could be separated in
transciption by a dot or hyphen.  Or long vowels could be followed by the
widely known symbol for length, the colon.  There is no need ever to
represent shwa, because it's always there between two consonants (except
in the rare cases where the first is silent, in which case it could be put
in parentheses or the like). There are lots of ways of doing it without
using Enlish/Roman letters to represent utterly different Hebrew sounds,
making the transciption opaque.  As an example, here's just one
possibility:  bre:'shi:th bArA' 'Elo:hi:m 'e:th hashshAmayim w'e:th
hA'AreS. 

Robert Hoberman 
robert.hoberman AT sunysb.edu