Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Jason wrote:

> I thought that HLL was a piel form, so both lameds were to be 
> pronounced. Am I just off?

I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, but let me try to explain.
Hallel is a piel. The two written lameds are radicals, and the first is
lengthened, generally shown in transcription as doubling, as I've done
here. Hallelu reduces the tsere, as we would expect, so that it is
written with a shva. Now, we often distinguish between vocal (or mobile)
shva and silent shva. This shva would be vocalized as a brief grunt,
more or less the same thing we mean by shwa in English. But that's not
necessarily the end of the story on vocalization. First, the Masoretes,
who were otherwise very precise in their markings, apparently saw no
need to distinguish vocal shva from silent. Is it possible, then, that
shva is really intended to mark the absence of any real vowel, leaving
the rest to natural speech tendencies? We see, for instance, in modern,
spoken Israeli Hebrew that so-called vocal shva is sometimes not
pronounced, while so-called silent shva sometimes is.

Matters are further complicated by the loss of dagesh when followed by
shva. It doesn't always happen, but in the case of this particular verb,
the pattern is consistent. So we don't actually get hallelu, but halelu.
Jouon suggests that what is going on here is a weakening of the
lengthened consonant, similar to what we call virtual doubling in
gutturals, because of the weak shva following. Not that it's not
lengthened at all, but it is not fully lengthened and so loses the
dagesh. Whatever the reason, we end up with two identical consonants
side-by-side and no good reason that they would have to be pronounced
separately. So it is possible that they would be pronounced together,
like one lengthened consonant. It is also possible that the shva would
take on some sort of pronounication here, similar to what generally
happens in spoken Israeli. Exactly what the Masoretes had in mind is a
bit hard to say.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics