Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

> The evidence accepted by most Semiticists is that the fricativisation of
bgdkpt took
> place in Aramaic first, and then in Hebrew under the influence of Aramaic
in
> the period 400-100BC.

Some fricativisation certainly took place. I agree with Peter that the
sounds still were aspirated plosives, not fricatives as today.

> If that is true, as widely accepted, then the issue
> of singing is not that important, as Aramaic was a spoken language and
shows
> the same alternation between stop and fricative.

The same alternation? Do you mean there is a proof of dagesh kal (loss of
aspiration in second-consonant-in-a-row, including, because of amalgamation,
the word-initial position) in Aramaic?

> The Gaelic languages also followed the same
> path, although the distribution is more like Hebrew than Greek where all
> stops became spirants.

I'm not more than superficially familiar with the subject, but I'm not aware
of the Gaelic languages regularly reducing aspiration of word-initials, as
the dagesh kal does.

> The non-uniform occurrence of stop/fricative alternation is more easily
explained by the
> linguistic milieu in which Hebrew was maintained in more recent times than
> by a late beginning to the process.

No language has the dagesh kal pattern.

> Would it not have been better to base research on actual chanting in a
> variety of synagogues - Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Oriental - rather than an
> art from so foreign to traditional Jewish culture?

The singing in the time of the Masoretes was likely very close to opera,
because of the guttural pronuciation. Modern cantors, even Sephardic, mostly
lost that deep guttural pronunciation, their sounds moving up the larynx,
just close to the mouth area.
Besides, both Ashkenazic and Sephardic phonology moved away from the
Masoretes. Gemination in hitpael "undoubtedly" confirm penultimate stress.
But that leaves unstressed (final) tzere in super-heavy (geminated)
syllable, quite an impossibility in speech - but very possible in singing.
Ashkenazim preserved the place of accent, necessarily twisting the vowels;
Sephardim preserved the vowels by shifting the accent.

Vadim Cherny