Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

> Do you mean "stop" as a synonym of "plosive"?
>
No. A stop is a stop, plosification only being its consequence in specific
environment. That stop is more clear in singing: when encountering two
consonants in a row (word-initial, or after a closed syllable), a singer
must make a vocal pause before the second consonant, otherwise it would be
jammed, "eaten", indistinct.

I originally assumed that dagesh is a stop because of the following.
Masoretes introduced myriad of intricate marks, even redundant ones as
rafeh. Their idea was to provide "unambiguous" guide for singing the Tanakh.
They would never, never mark two different phenomena with one sign.
Therefore, they meant the same thing wherever they used dagesh. What is
common between dagesh kal and hazak, between plosification and gemination? A
preceding stop.
There are other reasons for thinking of dagesh as a stop. The first is
mappiq - it is exactly the same mark as dagesh, yet hey do not geminate or
become plosive. The answer is that mappiq is also a stop, providing for
clear pronunciation of final hey.
The second is earlier practice of using the dagesh-like dot to distinguish
between the words, similar to modern spaces. Inter-word pause is exactly the
same semi-vocal stop as the one present before geminative or plosified
consonants.

> >"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.
>
> Sometimes features persist for centuries or millennia in one environment
> but are lost quickly in others.
>
But even Sephards almost lost vocal schwa.
Unless we continue to assume--totally implausibly--that Masoretes meant two
different sounds with the same sign of schwa, we have to assume that all
schwas sounded the same for Masoretes. So, now-silent intra-consonantal
schwa was vocal. This could only happen in singing, not in speech.

> > LXX and even 11th-century Cyrillic Bible
> >have fricatives where MT indicates dagesh kal. ...
>
> 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

The evidence on Koine pronunciation is scant. While beta is more or less
agreed to have sounded between b and v, there is no agreement on other
letters. But the point is different:
choosing between phi and pi for transliteration of pei, the translators used
phi, and not pi. This is how they heard it. Call it fricative or
fricativised, no difference, but the sound Masoretes indicated as plosive
was in speech closer to fricative than to plosive. Why Masoretes plosified
it? They did not! They only put a stop--dagesh--for distinct singing, and
that stop later produced plosificiation.

> Hence the Slavic transliteration, and the Russian form of Bethlehem which
is more like
> Vifleem - theta having shifted to an F sound.
Slavic Bible acquired Aramaic pronuciation, likely from Khazars which were
numerous in Kiev after their kingdom was destroyed. Slavic Bible does not
follow LXX spelling. But that's not the issue at hand.

> My point here was not about exactly how these vowels are pronounced, but
> simply that the other vowel points unambiguously represent vowel sounds.
>
"Unambiguously"? Tell this to Ashkenazim.
No one argues that some marks represent vowel sounds. The problem is, the
Masoretic vowels are too complex for speech. Masoretes just could not have
heard these minute differences. But these differences are clear in singing.

> Some languages preserve much more intricate and complex sets of vowel
> sounds than Hebrew. English has a huge repertoire of vowel phonemes.

Those are based on pitch variance. What about the length variance,
particularly segol (short ae, quite an impossible sound) and ultra-short
hatafs? What other language preserve short ae (not short 'ae, a very
different Russian sound) and ultra-short other vowels? Masoretic vowels are
not intended for speech. Masoretes made singing guide, they were unconcerned
with speech.

> Russian has three different pronunciations of "o", all in the word
> хорошое.
The Russian word you mentioned has two "o." The sound you wrote as last "o"
is actually 'ae. The two "o" sound exactly the same in the traditional
literary (trans-Volga) pronunciation. Vulgar pronunciation of unstressed "o"
is straight "a," not some variety of "o" as you imagine.

Let's summarize the questions to structure the discussion:

- do we believe that Masoretes marked different phenomena with one sign, or
should we assume that both schwas sounded similarly, and both dageshes had
the same effect?
- what did the Masoretes do: guide for singing the Tanakh, or grammar?
- did the Masoretes faithfully recorded synchronic pronunciation?
- why Masoretes indicated plosification of word-initials while the LXX
translators heard them closer to fricatives?

Vadim Cherny