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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 13:45:49 +0000

On 11/02/2005 13:01, Vadim Cherny wrote:

... Quite obviously, ancient sound was in between pure plosive
and fricative, whatever we might choose to call it.


Vadim, I will not stop this while you continue to reiterate this statement which is nonsense to a phonetician.

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

There is no such distinction. At least, there is none written by the

Masoretes,

The Masoretes wrote nothing about gemination ...


They did. They wrote long books about such things, in very difficult Hebrew.

... or plosification. ...


Of course not, because this exists only in your imagination.

... If we look
for possible universal meaning of dagesh kal and hazak, there is only one: a
stop, intermission. The Masoretes meant stop where they put dagesh. All our
notions of gemination or plosification are deductions or a tradition; there
is no evidence that the Masoretes heard gemination where they put dagesh.


There is a lot of evidence e.g. in transliterations and in the history of Semitic languages, as well as in the Masoretes' own words, that dagesh in intevocalic positions (dagesh hazaq) represents gemination.


this second radical takes dagesh whatever letter it is, except for the few
letters which never take dagesh.



No one argues that the second radical takes dagesh. The issue is, what that
dagesh means? And I say, the dagesh cannot mean "both" gemination and
plosification simultaneously, that hitcabbed (plosification and gemination)
is unpronounceable, though more aspirated hitcannes (gemination only) is
fine.


I agree, it does not mean "gemination and plosification simultaneously", but only gemination. But gemination also that the alternative process of fricativisation (sometimes called spirantisation) does not apply. But I don't see anything unpronounceable in "hitcabbed", geminated b is no less pronounceable than geminated n.


... where did the Masoretes heard such "relative plosification" of
second-in-a-row consonants? The translators of LXX heard no such thing.
Nor is "relative plosification" of second-in-a-row common in other Semitic
languages. ...


Of course not. No one has ever heard "relative plosification" or any kind of plosification, because this does not exist outside your imagination.

But if you are talking about the process by which begadkepat plosives were protected from fricativisation when immediately following other consonants, this process (which is specific to Hebrew) may well be attested in transliterations. But the details of the fricativisation are lost in time as it is not clearly attested in Greek or in Jerome's Latin - the latter seems to use b,g,d for the voiced begadkepat and ch,ph,th for the voiceless regardless of fricativisation. So, it is quite possible that the fricativisation process was quite a recent one in the Masoretes' time, or perhaps paralleled the similar fricativisation process in early Byzantine Greek.

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



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