Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Peter wrote:

> How do you distinguish <C, sheva, C> from <C, dagesh>? e.g. 
> how do you 
> write what is HAL:LW. YFH. in M-C encoding? Would you write 
> halluw yahh 
> (with superscipted w)? There is something missing here, 
> surely.

You're right, there is. I'm not sure what to do about it. My inclination
is to mark consonantal lengthening by some means other than writing the
consonant doubled, but I'm not sure what it would be.

> (And do 
> you write he with mappiq as double h, or as single h 
> distinguished from 
> the mater h by a not being superscripted?)

It's not doubled, so there's no reason to write it doubled. I would
write it as a normal h.

> (Also I am assuming u with 
> superscript w for vav shruqa).

That is correct.
> 
> Surely open e or e grave would be phonetically more appropriate (and 
> more compact) than ae diphthong for segol.

Could you explain this a bit more? As I say, I got ae from
Saenz-Badillos. The IPA epsilon is another option--my choice of ae was
mostly for mechanical reasons, since it's an easy symbol to use in
LaTeX.
> 

[snipped]

> What do you do about word final alef in biblical Aramaic 
> (since you have 
> just argued on the Aramaic list that this was silent and so a 
> mater long 
> before the Tiberian Masoretic period)?

Another good question. I'm not sure how well it would work to
superscript the glottal stop sign. Since at this point my primary
concern is with Hebrew, I haven't settled on an answer yet.
> 
[snipped]

> Not quite. There are a few other cases, mostly Yerushala(y)im and one 
> word in Exodus 20:4, where two vowel points occur with one 
> base character.

Obviously, K-Q situations, including perpetuals like Yerushalayim, have
to be handled as their own problem. This is where I think we'd benefit
from a practice of distinguishing transliteration from transcription;
but for my purposes, I would usually write the Qere.
> 
> >... I don't want to write quiescent alef as a superscript, 
> because it 
> >is actually the opposite of a mater. I don't want to put 
> either one in 
> >parenthesis, because I think that looks ugly and is probably 
> >unnecessary.
> >
> >  
> >
> Quiescent alef has no pointing, and so is distinguished (but only 
> non-finally) from non-quiescent alef which is pointed at least with 
> sheva. Your system would lost that distinction. There are 
> just 51 cases 
> in the WLC e-text of alef with sheva, all following a vowel 
> and followed 
> by a consonant, which in this system would not be distinguished from 
> quiescent alef

Would any of them fail to show the distinction in voweling that we
should expect? For instance, just looking at Gen 4:23 as your first
example, the patah preceding alef shows that the syllable is treated as
truly closed. Again, it's not ideal to place this much burden on the
reader, but then again, how often will it really matter whether or not
the shva is present?

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics