Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Jason wrote:

> But, who would pronounce a doubled chet? LOL

An Arabic speaker, for one. Arabic has no rule about non-doubling of
gutturals. It seems safe to say, then, that there's no intrinsic reason
why Hebrew speakers would not have been able to double them.

> I think the same is true of the other letters. Would you want 
> to pronounce a doubled shin or kuf without following it with 
> a (real) vowel?? I think that is the explanation for the loss 
> of dagesh-eliminating the cacophony.

Probably so. But if the vowel doesn't change, this is not simply a
matter of removing the doubling. Now, since this always happens with a
following shva, it's just possible that in the spoken language the
consonant shortened and the following original vowel (marked by the
shva) was lost altogether, resulting in a new analysis where the
originally doubled consonant closed one syllable and the following
consonant opened a new one. This still wouldn't account for what's going
on with "virtually" doubled gutturals, but it's at least a possibility
here. One way or another, though, I think there's good reason to look
for an explanation of why this differs from quiescent alef.
> 
> > > Perhaps pronouncing the double consonant
> > > without a vowel following was a pain, and for euphonic reasons it 
> > > was dropped (even as stated earlier in this thread). That makes 
> > > perfect sense to me.
> >
> > And pronouncing alef at the end of a syllable apparently became a 
> > pain. The difference is that the loss of alef resulted in a vowel 
> > shift to fit an open syllable. What's the difference?
> 
> Usage. ;-)

If that's as far as you want to take it, there's no point in having this
discussion. But if we think language change actually makes sense in some
twisted way, there's reason to look for an explanation. I don't think
it's too much of a stretch to suggest that there's a weakened
lengthening of the consonant in the situations we've been discussing.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics