Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Let's look from another angle. Isn't it strange that seemingly all vowels 
comply with syntactical stress and other derivative patterns?

I analyzed all cases, and here are a few:

verbs precede nouns, and syntactical accent is stronger on verbs. And yes, 
accented vowel elongates in verbs to tzere. Similarly, holam in adjectives.

Recall a similar Ashkenazic case of davAr - dAvar - dOivor: accented vowel 
elongated to holam, unstressed shortened to (whatever they say) kamatz-katan.

Thus, every instance of a vowel could be traced to kamatz.
Shuruk? This is a holam that lost accent: gadOl - gdulAh.
Hirek? This is tzere unstressed.
Patah? A remnant of stressed tzere in syllables limited by stop: dibar.ti

To me, this suggests that all vowels derived from kamatz. And so there was no 
sense to write that kamatz, originally the only vowel.
This is not a theory, but a suggestion, but it seems plausible.

Vadim Cherny