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  • From: Henry Churchyard <churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>
  • To: b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: Tiberian vowel system
  • Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 23:59:15 -0600 (CST)


>> Subject: Saenz-Badillos on Tiberian pronunciation <LYR12657-916-1999.
>> Author: rdhoberman AT ccmail.sunysb.edu at internet
>> Date: 26/03/1999 09:38

>> Traditional Hebrew grammar textbooks do still say things like that
>> "long" qames is to be pronounced a and "short" qames like o, which
>> certainly is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. They are
>> reproducing a docrine that goes back to David Kimhi. I doubt that
>> any linguist for the past 50 or 100 years has thought of that as a
>> coherent description as it stands. (For a more nuanced,
>> knowledgeable and incredibly thoroughgoing version of this
>> Silberman might look at Malone's book Tiberian Hebrew Phonology.)
>> Clearly, there were historical correspondences between Tiberian and
>> Sephardi pronunciations; what's wrong with trying to figure them
>> out?

> Subject: Churchyard on Tiberian pronunciation
> From: peter_kirk AT SIL.ORG
> Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 00:06:07 -0500

> Well, maybe Henry Churchyard is the exception that proves your rule,
> but in his thesis (dated this year rather than more than 50-100
> years ago, p.138 of the version I downloaded from the Internet) he
> writes concerning qamets and qamets-hatuph:

> "These two sounds are written with the same grapheme in the
> Tiberian orthography, but as discussed below, come from separate
> diachronic sources (o from Proto-Semitic *u and aa mainly from
> Proto-Semitic *a), behave differently in the synchronic Tiberian
> Hebrew phonological system, and are pronounced differently in many
> attested modern Jewish pronunciations of Hebrew (Blau 1976:10)."
> [...] "it remains clear that short o and long aa act differently
> within the phonological system of Tiberian Hebrew itself, though
> written homographously" (p.157).

Mr. Hoberman is right, in that there has been a certain "revisionist"
movement in recent decades towards a more direct "seven-quality"
interpretation of the Tiberian vowel orthography (though there are
actually two distinct sub-theories -- the Khan and Goerwitz camp, who
don't posit any distinctive vowel quantity contrasts vs. the Malone
and Garr camp who posit 7 qualities and two quantities, allowing up to
14 distinctive vowel phonemes). However, the "purest" linguists (in
the sense of being theoretical phonologists) have generally pretty
much stuck within the traditional Qimh.ian interpretation (5 vowel
qualities vs. two quantities) in their analyses -- Malone is very much
an exception here -- and I argue in my dissertation that it's hard to
get a good basic generative analysis of Tiberian phonotactic
patternings and phonological alternations except within a Qimh.ian
framework (though I know DeCaen and Malone would not agree with me).

A general comparison between the basic structural patterns of Sephardi
and Ashkenazic pronunciations is actually one of the pieces of
evidence I use (though I don't go into enough detail into variant
Ashkenazi pronunciations to satisfy Mr. Silberman -- this is an area
that I have have very little knowledge in, and which is not very
directly relevant to the main topic of my dissertation).

A 1997 version of the part of my dissertation that talks about the
interpretation of the Tiberian orthography only is available at
http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~churchyh/chp1xcpt.zip (225k download),
and a more up-to-date version of the whole dissertation at
http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~churchyh/hc299dis.zip (1.5 Meg download),
both in Zip-compressed Adobe Acrobat PDF format.

--
--Henry Churchyard churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu



  • Re: Tiberian vowel system, Henry Churchyard, 03/27/1999

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