Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Why assume the Masoretes recorded spoken Hebrew?

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: Vadim Cherny <VadimCherny AT mail.ru>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Why assume the Masoretes recorded spoken Hebrew?
  • Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 00:38:11 +0000

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/



--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.6 - Release Date: 07/02/2005





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page