Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 10/02/2005 09:15, Vadim Cherny wrote:

> > Do you mean "stop" as a synonym of "plosive"?
> >
> >    
> No. A stop is a stop, ...

I'm sorry, but this kind of recursive definition is not very helpful. I 
have no idea now what you mean by a stop. (What is the Russian word you 
have in mind?)  Therefore the rest of your posting is meaningless to me.

> ... 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.
>  

Do you mean "stop" as a synonym for "pause"? I can see that this might 
make some sense superficially, but it doesn't fit every case - certainly 
not mappiq.

...

> 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.
>  

No, I don't assume that two different sounds were meant. Conceivably all 
shevas were silent or all shevas were vocal. I don't see why it is so 
implausible that all shevas were once pronounced as vocal in speech - 
there are actually many spoken languages in which there is always a 
vowel sound after each consonant, no consonant clusters, and Hebrew 
could have been pronounced like that by some people in some places.

> ...
>
>
> 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, ...

No, I don't call it either. I call it an aspirated plosive. Vadim, in 
Russian plosives are not usually aspirated, but they are (mostly) in 
English and Azerbaijani for example. Listen to the word initial (before 
a vowel) P, T and K sounds of an English speaker, or of Azerbaijanis at 
your local market. They are not fricatives at all, but this sound 
difference is probably one of the main distinctive features of 
Azerbaijanis speaking Russian.

> ... 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.
>  

For all your assertions, this is very unlikely to be true. You have 
given no evidence for your unlikely hypothesis being preferable to the 
standard reconstruction.

> ...
>
> 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.
>  

Not true at least of the Russian Bible which I was referring to, in 
which names are consistently transliterated from LXX, but indeed 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. ...
>  

My point is not that there is no ambiguity about the exact vowel sound, 
but that everyone agrees that these marks represent vowels.

> ... 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. ...

Vadim, I was trained in phonetics to hear small sound differences, and 
as a result of that training I can hear much more subtle vowel sound 
differences than any recorded by the Masoretes. There are just eleven or 
twelve different vowel sounds recorded by the Masoretes, which is fewer 
than the number of vowel phonemes clearly recognised and used 
distinctively in English and many other languages.

> ... 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. ...

Not true. English is not a tonal language.  What you mean perhaps is a 
variation in vowel quality e.g. height. In fact the differences in 
English are a subtle interaction between vowel quality, length and 
diphthongisation or gliding.

> ... What about the length variance,
> particularly segol (short ae, quite an impossible sound) ...

Tell hundreds of millions of American English speakers for whom this is 
one of the commonest vowel sounds, short a - slightly different in 
British English. Just because this sound is not in Russian, that doesn't 
make it impossible to speak.

> ... and ultra-short
> hatafs? What other language preserve short ae (not short 'ae, a very
> different Russian sound) and ultra-short other vowels? ...

English, for a start. The English system is not identical to the Hebrew 
one, of course, but it does have something like five long vowels, five 
short ones and two ultra-short ones. Actually Russian is not that 
different either, if you listen carefully.

> ... 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.
>  

I don't imagine. I know that in standard modern spoken Russian (which 
you can call "vulgar" if you like, a word which in fact derives from 
"Volga" via "Bulgar") unstressed "o" is pronounced like unstressed "a", 
and in fact close to British English short "u", and the third "o" in 
that word has yet another pronunciation.

According to Terence Wade's "A Comprehensive Russian Grammar", the 
following vowel sounds are heard in Russian (in IPA, you need Unicode to 
read some of these):

Stressed: a ɛ u o ɨ i e æ ö ü   

Unstressed (additional): ɩ ɩ̵ ʌ ə

> 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?
>  

I don't think we should assume either a priori, but the latter is more 
likely. We must allow, however, that the Masoretes (whose ability to 
distinguish sounds you have been impeaching and I have been defending) 
may not have heard every distinction picked up by modern phoneticians, 
and so "similar effect" is better than "the same effect".

> - what did the Masoretes do: guide for singing the Tanakh, or grammar?
>  

Both.

> - did the Masoretes faithfully recorded synchronic pronunciation?
>  

Of course.

> - why Masoretes indicated plosification of word-initials while the LXX
> translators heard them closer to fricatives?
>  

The latter is untrue, or at least questioned by many serious analysts of 
Koine Greek pronunciation. That implies that the former is likely to be 
untrue.


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



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