Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

> I used to teach little kids to read Hebrew, and believe me shva
> was there. (There are two types shva nah, and shva nach) Also the dagesh
> was very important for pronunciation.  No Jew could say his daily prayers
> correctly without knowing how to properly pronounce words with a shva, or
a
> dagesh.

We're talking of the same thing. The religious texts are pronounced were
clearly, with schwas and dageshes. Would you agree that pronouncing them in
speech is uncomfortable? They come up much more natural in chanting.

Dagesh hazak is almost lost in Sephardic, though more clear in Ashkenazic
where it coincides with post-tonic gemination.
Vocal schwas are very weak in Israeli Hebrew.
And, if we assume that all schwas were vocal for Masoretes, then some of
them (inter-consonantal) became silent.

These features did not survive in speech since the time of Masoretes. Why
assume they survived from Moshe or Ezra to ben Naftali?
Dageshes and schwas, however, survived in chanting. Accordingly, I suggest
that Masoretes heard them not in speech, but in singing or chanting of
religious texts.
If so, ben Yehuda wasn't right to reconstruct the spoken language from
Masoretic phonology, intended for chanting.

Vadim Cherny