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  • From: Trevor Peterson <06PETERSON AT cua.edu>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] /h/ interrogative vs. article (was Re: The word "or" in Numbers 13:18-20)
  • Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 13:56:57 -0500

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




  • [b-hebrew] /h/ interrogative vs. article (was Re: The word "or" in Numbers 13:18-20), Trevor Peterson, 02/24/2004

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