Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

I didn't have time to respond to this the first time around, but something 
reminded me to look back through the archives and make a quick reply:

Peter wrote:

>Interrogative H comes with different pointing from the article H. The
>article is nearly always H with patah followed by dagesh in the
>following letter, or is lengthened to H with qamats or sometimes segol
>if the following letter cannot take dagesh - but not always lengthened
>before he and het. Interrogative H usually has hataf patah or patah with
>no following dagesh. And so in most cases there is no ambiguity in a
>pointed text, although I think there may be before he and het.

Althought I'm generally inclined to agree, in fairness I think it ought to be 
pointed out that Alexander Sperber (1966, A Historical Grammar of Biblical 
Hebrew), in his section on "The Preposition H (Indicating the determinate 
state or a question)," says that "H <i>interrogativum</i> and H of the 
article 
are both equally vocalized" (623). He goes on to cite several examples where 
the form is indistinguishable (before alef, he, chet, resh, mem over shva, 
and 
several other examples that I'd have to examine more closely, where he says 
he-patach-strong dagesh is an interrogative (624-25). In conclusion, he says, 
"There was no difference in the pronunciation of the preposition H, whether 
in 
the function of an article, or in that of an interrogative particle. The 
context excluded the possibility of confusion. It is solely due to Masoretic 
schematization that the tendency became prevalent to differentiate between 
the 
two functions of the preposition by way of vocalization" (625).

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics