Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Trevor Peterson <06PETERSON AT cua.edu>]

>===== Original Message From "Joshua AT can-do.net" <joshua AT can-do.net> =====
>Shalom list :)
>
>The recent discussion related to shewa and its pronunciation has raised some
>questions in my mind. The first is thus: If there are two types of shewa
>(vocal and quiescent/silent), why did the Massoretic scribes not distinguish
>between them as they do for all the other vowels (less qamets / qamets
>chatuf)?

My question exactly (except that I would say the latter distinction is also
contrived--the Masoretes probably pronounced them both the same way).

[snipped]

>And how can we relate what we know to finding two shewa's back to back in a
>word? If the second shewa was silent, words like miš-pe-têy (MŠPTY) would
>become something like mišp-têy with an internal cluster of consonants. It
>would appear Hebrew tries (tried?) to avoid such consonant clusters (even
>words with diphthongs like *bayt become bayit with an anaptyctic vowel; the
>exception being at the end of the word, like kâ-tavt KTBT). If silent, I
>guess it would beg the question: Did Hebrew try to avoid consonant clusters?
>Maybe in the Biblical period the native Hebrew speaker would have had no
>problem with internal consonant clusters. Can anyone provide some insights
>on this?

One point I would bring up here is that when we talk about sound rules, we're
generally trying to put them in some sort of chronological order. The point is
that language changes, and over time different impulses can produce different
effects. It would seem that all Semitic languages eventually had to go through
a phase of losing final short vowels. Arabic went through it much later than
Hebrew, and the resulting final consonant clusters were left intact. Within
Hebrew, we see that in modern speech, consonant clusters are not much of a
problem. Maybe this is due to influence from other languages, but at what
point do we suppose that Hebrew was not influenced by other languages? It all
has to be taken into account. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's
nothing wrong with the suggestion that at one stage Hebrew could avoid
consonant clusters and at another could create them.

More importantly, though, I think we need to be careful in all of this about
the difference between language and writing practice. Just because the
Masoretes didn't see the difference between a vocal and silent shva as
significant enough to encode it doesn't mean that a linguist observing their
speech couldn't have picked up a distinction. Even today, Hebrew speakers
sometimes vocalize shvas and sometimes don't, according to a different set of
phonetic rules than the medieval grammarians imposed on the text. One could
just as easily say that shva represents a vowel that was not always pronounced
as that it represents an absence of a vowel that sometimes just had to be
vocalized. Either way, I think the important thing to realize is that the
distinction was not important to the Masoretes.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics