Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Matthew Anstey" <manstey AT portal.ca>]

Gday all,

Just a question of curiosity for me.

I was wondering if anyone thinks that native BH speakers would have been
able to use pausal forms in everyday speech situations. Or were such words
just spelled differently in written texts? So Baruch, when hearing Jeremiah
say "ha'erets" spoken in a pausal sentence position (or by some other
mechanism ???) would have written down automatically "ha'arets". What other
hypostheses could explain their presence in the MT?

Assuming they were part of the everyday speech use, has anyone done work on
the linguistic rules by which a native speaker would generate these forms?
Presumably they could make any form pausal if it was necessary. Would they
be primarily syntactic and/or pragmatic? And do pausal forms always appear
where predicted?

Thanks for your insights,
Matthew Anstey