Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 01/08/2005 19:01, Vadim Cherny wrote:

> RE: [b-hebrew] YHWH pronunciationExactly. In your examples, he is not lost, 
> but somehow transliterated. One such transliteration is assimilation 
> ha-alpha. In Iao, the second he is lost completely. Peter, as I understand 
> him, suggests that the first he is also lost completely, though much weaker 
> schwa survived as aleph.
>  

You misunderstand me. I do not hold that there was any schwa in the 
divine name, although there is (at least in the Masoretic pronunciation) 
in the reduced (cf. construct) form used as a prefix in theophoric 
names. Anyway, I dispute that schwa is "much weaker" than he. It is very 
hard to quantify the strength of a sound, but certainly to me, 
subjectively, any vowel sound is stronger than an "h", which is in many 
ways the weakest sound at least in the English language. It is well 
known that the sound "h" disappears in many European languages e.g. 
French and Spanish, also in Greek when not word initial - and in later 
Greek which explains why Russian forms of Greek names are always missing 
any "h", and never have a "g" where there was a Greek "h" - except 
perhaps for a few secondary borrowings via German, English etc like 
"gorizont".

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



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