Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Reinhard G.Lehmann" <lehmann AT mail.Uni-Mainz.de>]

R. Hoberman wrote:
> 
> 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
> 

It sound plausible - I would prefer that way of transliteration.

Reinhard G.Lehmann
 
       *****************************************
       Reinhard G. Lehmann
       Lect. for Classical Hebrew and Aramaic
       Johannes-Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz
       D - 55099 Mainz
       tel: +49 - 6131 - 39 3284
       mailto:lehmann AT mail.uni-mainz.de
       http://www.uni-mainz.de/~lehmann
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