Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk" <Peter_Kirk AT sil.org>]

I am investigating places in the Hebrew text where two vowels occur with the
same consonant. I have found the following cases, from a search on the WTS
database:

636 cases of various forms of Jerusalem e.g. Y:RW.$FLA^IM (many times),
Y:RW.$FLF^IM (many times), Y:RW.$FLA^:M/FH (x2), Y:RW.$FLF^:M/FH (x1) (^
indicates any cantillation and / a morpheme break) with variants with
cantillations in different places and without the shewa (where following a
prepositional prefix).

583 cases of furtive patah immediately following another vowel point - the
patah logically goes with the penultimate consonant, though it is written
under the final one.

1 (just one!) other unique instance in Exodus 20:4, coded T.F^^AXAT in WTS:
Here the one taw carries two vowel points as well as two cantillations. The
double cantillation is regular in the Ten Commandments. But can anyone
explain the double vowel point? Is this really part of the text, or a
copyist's error?

Are there any more cases in Hebrew (biblical or otherwise) where two vowel
points need to be written with the same letter? For example, does this ever
happen with Ketiv/Qere? The way WTS handles Ketiv/Qere is different from the
printed text, so I cannot search for places where a single Ketiv consonant
may carry more than one Qere vowel - though there are cases (Qere without
Ketiv) of vowels with no consonants at all.

There is a need to understand such cases so that we can ensure that they can
be encoded and displayed properly in a new generation of software, based on
Unicode. So I would be glad of any technical help on these details.

Peter Kirk