Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Trevor & Julie Peterson" <06peterson AT cua.edu>]

Actually, it would be a long-a in every case that I can think of. The use of the meteg to specify is inconsistent, so you have to go by morphology where it's absent. Assuming we're talking about G-stem (Qal) verbs and the perfect tense-form, the 3ms always has a long-a. The shva results from vowel reduction, so it marks the consonant as its own syllable. (My understanding is that it's not pronounced that way in Modern Hebrew, but it still tells you that the preceding vowel is a, not o.)

 

Trevor Peterson

CUA/Semitics

-----Original Message-----
From: Polycarp66 AT aol.com [mailto:Polycarp66 AT aol.com]
Sent: Sunday, January 13, 2002 1:31 AM
To: Biblical Hebrew
Subject: Re: short or long

In a message dated 1/13/2002 12:10:06 AM Eastern Standard Time, hebrew2day AT hotmail.com writes:

In the 3rd person plural (M or F) perfect tense how do you tell if the
vowel is long or short, or if the shva is silent or vocal?
I know the functions of the shva, but when the vowel is a gamets(before
conjugated) does it change?

Example:

Gen 1.21 $fR:CW. 
Since a syllable must begin on a consonant (unless it's a shureq), and since there is no metheg to indicate the beginning of a new syllable this must be divided

$fR:     |      CW.

The accent here is Milra' (on the last syllable).  This means that the "f" is in a closed and UNACCENTED syllable.  It therefore must be hames-qatuph. 

gfsomsel

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