Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Vadim Cherny" <VadimCherny AT mail.ru>]

> >Modern spoken Hebrew completely lost schwa and dagesh, certainly dagesh
kal, ...
>
> Not true. It still has dagesh kal distinction in bet, in pe and in kaf,
> i.e. quite different sounds corresponding to presence or absence of
> dagesh kal.
>
Obviously. But I explain later on that I believe both dageshes marked the
same feature: a stop, of which gemination and plosification were
environment-specific consequences. That stop is now lost.

> >... in only a century since its reinstatement as living language. ...
>
> Not true. The phonetic differences between modern and earlier Hebrew
> long predate the late 19th century "reinstatement" of spoken Hebrew.
>
Why is this hair-splitting? I obviously speak only of schwa and dagesh. If
you mean that schwa and dagesh were lost in cantillation by the late
nineteenth century--perhaps, but not certainly. At least, ben Yehuda meant
them to be pronounced.

> >... Is it plausible that schwa and dagesh persisted for millennia, to be
heard by Masoretes? Hardly so.
>
> Totally plausible. Many comparable linguistic features are known and can
> be proved to have persisted for much longer than this in an unwritten
> environment.
>
I said something different. "If" schwa and dagesh were quickly lost in a
century from ben Yehuda's reconstruction, these features are phonetically
uncomfortable. Therefore, "these" particular features could not persist for
millennia. No doubt, natural features, such as gemination, perfectly
persisted.

> >No other language has general plosification of word-intitial fricative,
or the fricative following closed syllable. The dagesh kal does not
correspond to any existing phonological tradition.
>
> As clearly indicated by comparison with cognate languages and
> ancient transliterations, the process in Hebrew was fricativisation of
> intervocal plosives.

I'm not sure I follow your meaning. LXX and even 11th-century Cyrillic Bible
have fricatives where MT indicates dagesh kal. So the language started with
fricatives, which in certain positions were plosified.
This also makes sense of the dagesh marks: Masoretes put them to mark
"unusual" pronunciation, plosification of fricatives.
Other--unmarked--fricatives were pronounced without changes.

> SOME other masoretic marks, the accents, are used only
> for chanting. But there are many good reasons for distinguishing clearly
> between the vowel points used for normal pronunciation and the accents
> used for chanting.

I would be careful to speak about the "normal" pronunciation of vowels. They
are "not" pronounced as Masoretes intended (Ashkenazic, Sephardic). Some
vowels (segol, hatafs) just could not be pronounced in speech any
differently from the corresponding longer vowels. Little doubt that so
intricate differentation of vowels could not survive for centuries to be
heard by Masoretes.
The masoretic vowels make perfect sense only for singing, where these small
differences are perceptible.

The most important point is that only in singing schwa is clearly vocal
between consonants, and second consonant in a row is strengthened (dagesh
kal). Masoretes could not have heard these sounds in speech, where these
features are redundant, and would have been lost by their time.

Vadim Cherny