Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Henry Churchyard <churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>]

>> From:  manstey AT portal.ca

>> 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?
>> 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?

> Subject: Re: Pausal Forms
> From: peter_kirk AT sil.org
> Date: Tue, 06 Jul 1999 11:32:28 -0400

> I suspect a misunderstanding. Am I not right in saying that the
> pausal forms affect the vocalisation only?  And so Baruch would not
> have made any distinction when writing these down.  The pausal forms
> were surely written down by the Masoretes based on the pronunciation
> (including the positions in the text of pauses) in use in their
> time.  Presumably the presence of a pausal form at a particular
> point is no stronger evidence than a cantillation mark for a major
> division that there should actually be a logical break at that
> point.  On the other hand, is there any evidence for pausal forms in
> pre-Masoretic texts e.g. Origen's transliteration in the Hexapla?  I
> would feel sure, from my understanding of languages in general, that
> pausal forms are essentially a feature of spoken language which
> later came to be written down.  [...] it could equally have arisen
> in regular spoken language. Most languages, including English, have
> variations in intonation and sometimes stress and voicing before a
> pause. These variations can easily, over a long period, become
> changes in vowel quality and length. The Masoretes simply listened
> carefully and wrote down the vowels which they heard.

Peter -- you're correct in saying that almost all pausal/non-pausal
variations in phonology would not involve any difference in the basic
consonant-letter-only orthography of a word (according to the usual
rules for writing Biblical Hebrew with the 22 letters of the
consonantal alphabet), and so generally the only indication for
pausal/non-pausal alternations is in the masoretic orthographies,
developed after 500 A.D.  I've just put a little fragment of a
discussion by Richard Goerwitz on the web at
http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~churchyh/goerwitz.gif (I hope he won't
mind), and you can see that none of the alternation patterns is such
as would involve regular changes in the usual consonantal-alphabet
orthography of Biblical Hebrew (for some reason, Richard left the
pronouns 'attah and 'anoki off his chart, but these wouldn't show
alphabetic changes either).

But in certain cases people have actually tried to check for pausal
alternations in earlier sources.  For example, in pattern #1 on
Richard's chart, yiqtolu vs. yiqt@lu, the -o- vowel of yiqtolu is of a
type that was regularly written with a letter _waw_ according to
orthographic practices seen in some Qumran texts, so it can be asked
whether such _waw_ is omitted in non-pausal forms.  As I understand
it, the answer found was that there is no pausal conditioning for such
orthographic _waw_ (sorry I don't remember the details -- they're
probably in Goerwitz's dissertation).  But then the next question is
whether we can definitely conclude that there was no pausal
alternation in these forms, as pronounced at Qumran, and here things
become kind of uncertain.  For example, it's possible that there was a
pausal stress alternation between yiqtOlu and yiqtolU, but that such
stress alternation was not yet accompanied by vowel reduction to
sh@waa at that time, so that the -o- vowel would have been written by
the letter _waw_ in both pausal and non-pausal contexts.

External transcriptions into the Greek alphabet, etc. are a whole other
very difficult area (one in which I'm not really an expert), but it's
pretty basic knowledge that the pronunciation traditions that are
transcribed are substantially different from Tiberian, and that it's
very hard to try to consistently distinguish the Tiberian vowel symbols
on the basis of such transcriptions (Tiberian vocal shewa is most often
transcribed with Greek aleph or epsilon, for example).  There's
probably more discussion of the early external transcriptional evidence
for pause (if any) in Goerwitz's dissertation, but I know that a number
of years ago when I went searching for early external transcriptional
evidence for vowel reduction for my own dissertation, I found almost
nothing that was relevant and useful.

As for the linguistic basis of pausal/non-pausal alternations, the
basic factor is that pausal forms (at the end of major prosodic/
syntactic constituents) had a greater degree of stress.  Most pausal
phonological changes fall under two phenomena, vowel-lengthing and
blocking of stress-movement.  Here vowel-lengthing is a very natural
consequence of greater stress, and in my dissertation I discuss how
stress-shift blocking is also a natural result of a greater degree of
stress being placed on a word.

Here Richard Gowerwitz is oversimplifies little too much when he
states that "major pausal phonology" (i.e. stress-shift blocking, if
relevant, and also vowel lengthening, or vowel quality change) is
conditioned by major disjunctive accents, while "minor pausal
phonology" (i.e. stress-shift blocking alone) is conditioned by minor
disjunctive accents.  In my dissertation, I explore how the accentual
system correlates with "minor pausal phonology" (stress-shift
blocking) in detail (my dissertation is available in compressed Adobe
Acrobat PDF format at http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~churchyh/hc599dis.zip
warning: 1.5 MB file, somewhat theoretical), and it can be seen how
such stress alternations arose from prosodic patterns which could
naturally occur in speech, though they're a little fossilized in
Masoretic.  However this doesn't necessarily mean that such patterns
necessarily go back in Hebrew to the Old Testament times (though I
argue for an early origin for the consecutive imperfect stress
alternation in chapter 4 of my dissertation).

--
Henry Churchyard   churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu   http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/