Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

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/