Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 09/02/2005 22:19, Vadim Cherny wrote:

> > > 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.
>
>  
I don't quite understand. Do you mean "stop" as a synonym of "plosive"? 
If so your final statement remains untrue, for all BGDKPT letters with 
dagesh are now as always pronounced as plosives.

...

> 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.
>  

Sometimes features persist for centuries or millennia in one environment 
but are lost quickly in others. I'm sure there are good examples in the 
variable retention of features of Latin among different Romance 
languages, etc etc.

>  
>
> ...
>
> I'm not sure I follow your meaning. LXX and even 11th-century Cyrillic Bible
> have fricatives where MT indicates dagesh kal. ...

Not true again, although this one might be from genuine ignorance. True, 
Hebrew pe, tav and kaf are often transliterated into Greek as phi, theta 
and chi respectively. But this does not indicate a fricative 
pronunciation. At the time when the LXX was translated, and through the 
Koine period, these three Greek letters were pronounced  not as 
fricatives but as aspirated plosives - which may well have been the 
Hebrew pronunciation as well (contrasting perhaps with the unaspirated 
tet and qof). By the Byzantine period the Greek pronunciation of these 
letters had changed to fricative, in all environments. Hence the Slavic 
transliteration, and the Russian form of Bethlehem which is more like 
Vifleem - theta having shifted to an F sound.

> > 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. ...

My point here was not about exactly how these vowels are pronounced, but 
simply that the other vowel points unambiguously represent vowel sounds.

> ... 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.
>  

Some languages preserve much more intricate and complex sets of vowel 
sounds than Hebrew. English has a huge repertoire of vowel phonemes. 
Russian has three different pronunciations of "o", all in the word 
хорошое.  The difference in Hebrew is that these fine differences are 
not often represented in orthography.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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