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

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  • 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: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 12:00:40 +0000

On 11/02/2005 08:52, Vadim Cherny wrote:

An aspirated plosive is not a fricative at all. It is not a hoarse
sound. It is a plosive, a stop, in which the air stream is completely
blocked, which never happens with a fricative. A sound has to be one or
the other.


What difference does that make for the argument? Elongated sound with short
stop might be call aspirated plosive, or hoarse fricative (hoarseness
consists is mini-stops). ...


No, it might not. A plosive is not a fricative, and a fricative is not a plosive. The sound in a fricative does not come from mini-stops. You are thinking perhaps of a trill, which is a series of mini-stops, or a flap which is one very short stop. But a fricative is something quite different.

... Beta is commonly described as a sound between
plosive and fricative.


Only by people who don't know what they are talking about. Phonetic beta is a bilabial fricative, in which the lips are not completely closed and so there is no stop.

...

Hair-splitting. Say, word-initial pei in Masoretic phonology is more of a
plosive than some other pei's. This was not the case for LXX translators.
Would you agree with this statement?


Well, yes, if you can say that a plosive is more of a plosive than a non-plosive. Actually we can't tell from LXX whether at that time intervocalic pe was an aspirated plosive or a fricative, as Greek of that time did not have a bilabial fricative, and so the aspirated plosive phi would have been the closest substitute.

... The difference in aspiration is unrelated to inter-vocal position.

Some

inter-vocal begedkefet's are plosives (second radical in hitpael); ...

Yes, because they are geminated, as indicated by dagesh hazaq, and
geminated plosives never become fricatives, at least in Hebrew.


The begedkefet second radical in hitpael is plosified, not geminated. Not
hitcabbed, but rather, hitca.bed. ...


This is nonsense. There is no such distinction. At least, there is none written by the Masoretes, and the second radical is geminated in the equivalent verb form in many other Semitic languages. Furthermore, this second radical takes dagesh whatever letter it is, except for the few letters which never take dagesh.
...

Gemination of the second radical is a marker of
certain verb forms in all Semitic languages.


Let's talk about it. In which Semitic languages are we certain of ancient
gemination or plosification of second-in-a-row consonant after "vocal" schwa
(third radical in segholate, second in nifal, first in hitpael)?
Which Semitic language in antiquity consistently geminated or plosified the
word-initital?


We are certain that there is NO "plosification" in any Semitic language at any time. And I never claimed that there is gemination immediately following another consonant. In this case the rule that intervocal plosives become fricatives fails because the position is not intervocal - but in some words a formerly intervocal fricative is no longer intervocal because a vowel has been lost. As for gemination of the second radical in equivalents of piel and hitpael, there is ample evidence of this from Akkadian.
...

They could hear the differences whatever their occupation. Even if they
were market traders they needed to hear these differences as they could
be semantically significant in their market trading.


Not ultra-short a, I presume?


Ultra-short a (hataf patah) contrasts only quite rarely with other ultra-short letters, but the reality of its phonetic distinction from ultra-short e (hataf segol) is clear in the distinction between the initial vowels (following alef) in names like Abimelech and Elisha, distinctions which are preserved also in LXX.

There is a whole field of study of Tiberian phonology and prosody, of which I know rather little, which has looked into these things in detail. I suggest you look into that.

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



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