Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

I don't argue that "harass" or any other word could be pronounced 
differently. My point is, any speaker differentiates accent and vowel length 
among neutral, question, and exclamation.This is how we hear intonation. In 
exclamation, notably commands, first vowel is routinely reduced, just listen 
to milspeak.I hear the same in Arabic and English, so believe Hebrew 
imperatives are emphatic of neutral verbs. Try pronouncing catav is command, 
get c'tav or c'tov. Azerbaijani, Peter is right, stresses the first vowel in 
imperative at the expense of the second.

Vadim Cherny

.On 24/06/2005 08:22, Vadim Cherny wrote:

>This becomes ridiculous. ...
>

Vadim, George's point is that the English word "harass", like the 
Russian "tvorog" for example, has two different pronunciations with 
different stress patterns (but the same meaning), and each speaker will 
use the same basic stress pattern in the imperative as in other forms. 
So your example "harass" is an unfortunate choice.

I know that some Russian verbs shift their stress in the imperative, but 
I have no evidence of this happening in English, or for that matter in 
Hebrew. In Azerbaijani the shift is in the opposite direction: the 
stress is word final in most verb forms, and so on the ending, but in 
the imperative it moves backwards on to the verb stem - necessarily in 
the singular because there is no ending, but in the plural there is an 
ending which is, unusually, unstressed. So this kind of stress shift is 
by no means a language universal.

>
>  
>
>>Mr. Cherny obviously is lacking in his understanding of English.  There
>>are two distinct pronunciations of "harass" which are not determined by
>>the context in which they are found or the use to which they are put.
>>
>>Ha ' - es  or
>>Ha  - ras '
>>
>>The pronunciation used is determined by the preference of the one using
>>the term and not by its usage.
>>
>>george
>>gfsomsel
>>___________
>>
>>    
>>
>
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-- 
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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