Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

 At 12.02 27/09/00 +0000, Ben Crick wrote:

[snip]
In
Handel's Messiah, our choir director insisted that we articulate "He shall
reign for 'ever and 'ever" with glottal stops, not by singing it "he shall
reign forever endeavour".

Singing, especially the kind done in Messiah and other classical 
works, is not a good criterion for determining "normal" 
pronunciation.  "Proper" singing has its own rules of enunciation, 
diction, vowel shaping etc.  Many years ago when I was singing 
Messiah with a particular choir, the director instructed the 
sopranos to sing "And ho shall reign" because the "e" in "he" 
sounded screechy in that high register.  He also pounded into us 
the importance of saying "evah" rather than "everrrrrr."  Singing 
patterns won't tell us much about whether the Hebrews pronounced 
the doubled shin or not; it can't even tell us about ordinary 
pronunciation in our own languages.


Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"No study of probabilities inside a given frame can ever
tell us how probable it is that the frame itself can be
violated."  C. S. Lewis