Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Rasmus wrote:
> 
> Why not simply mark the mobile shewas with a superscript like 
> the matres, 
> giving them the same air of "letters that are written but may 
> not have been 
> pronounced"?

Partly because I don't think the Masoretes would have been so sloppy as
to use the same sign for a non-pronunciation and a half-vowel (or
whatever you want to call it). Not that it didn't get pronounced on
occasion, but the same is true in spoken Israeli Hebrew, even though it
doesn't follow the rules we normally expect of mobile shva. For that
reason, I don't want to distinguish the supposedly two types of shvas in
my transliteration any more than they are distinguished on the page.
Partly, too, I don't have a good idea for representing mobile shva. The
usual practice is to mark it the same way a half-segol gets marked. That
doesn't seem like a productive solution to me.
> 
> >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.
> 
> The letter "æ" in Danish and Norwegian regularly stands for 
> the open e 
> sound of IPA epsilon

OK, I thought that might have been what Peter was referring to. As I
said in my response to him, I did consider the IPA epsilon (and for that
matter, the backwards-c-looking open-o for qametz). I've seen both signs
used before, but as I said, it would be mechanically easier to follow
Saenz-Badillos. I guess his reference to e-grave probably comes from
French, but that doesn't appeal much to me either. (It has too much
potential for looking like an accent mark.)

> and therefore is also used in our Hebrew 
> translitteration to translitterate the sægol, compared to "e" 
> for tsere. 
> Thus "road" is »dærækh« and "book" is »sephær«.

Yes, that's what I would do.

Thanks,
Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics