Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 10/02/2005 12:36, Peter Kirk wrote:

> ...
>
> 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
I failed to complete this part of my posting before sending it. Here is 
a continuation:

This list indicated that modern phoneticians hear more distinct vowel 
sounds in modern spoken Russian (as well as English and many other 
modern languages) than the Masoretes heard in Hebrew.

Wade notes (p.5, 2nd edition of Wade):

The vowels o and a arepronounced as [o] and [a] only when they appear in 
stressed position...

In pre-tonic position or as the unstressed initial letter in a word o 
and a are pronounced [ʌ] ...

In pre-pre-tonic position (except as initial letters...) or in 
post-tonic position both vowels are pronounced [ə]...

This is very like the position in Hebrew. The full vowel sound e.g. 
qamats or holam is found only in stressed syllables, plus in Hebrew only 
in open unstressed syllables. In unstressed syllables just before the 
stress (in Hebrew, only when closed) the vowel is shortened e.g. to 
patah or qamats qatan. And in pre-pre-tonic position (but this time in 
Hebrew only in open syllables) there is a further shortening or 
modification to the schwa sound - but not word initially after alef. The 
details are nt identical, but the general picture is remarkably similar. 
It is also in English, because these kinds of vowel reductions are 
common across languages.

What is unusual about the Masoretes is that they attempted to record 
fine phonetic distinctions which had no semantic significance, whereas 
most modern Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are more phonemic i.e. not 
recording these fine distinctions.

--
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