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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Hebrew transliteration

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: Trevor Peterson <06peterson AT cua.edu>
  • Cc: 'Biblical Hebrew' <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Hebrew transliteration
  • Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 03:15:37 -0800

On 18/01/2004 18:15, Trevor Peterson wrote:

...

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.



My point is that segol, as I have heard it pronounced anyway, is more like IPA epsilon, or French e grave, than ae diphthong. But pronunciations vary - and also, as I discovered in Azerbaijan, there are significant differences between British and American perceptions of the boundary between e sounds and a sounds. So I won't push the point.

...

...

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?


I just looked again at my 51 examples. In all but three of the alef is preceded by patah or segol, and so the syllable is unambiguously closed. There are just three cases where there is ambiguity, given here in M-C encoding (the list standard):

JOB 31:40 BF):$FH
ISA 34:3 BF):$/FM
JOL 2:20 BF):$/OW

I suppose that the F's here in the first syllable are meant to be qamets hatuf, the o sound. But in your transliteration this cannot be distinguished from the long qamets followed by silent alef in for example RF)$IYM, Gen 2:10 etc etc. Whether that is important to you is for you to decide, but I would see it as significant enough to need consideration in a full scholarly transliteration.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/






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