Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

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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