Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Joshua Luna" <joshua AT can-do.net>]

James,

You suggested that you, "have never understood why every other vowel sign
the masoretes used would have been consistent, while the sheva is
(reportedly) used both vocally and silently."

It appears that Qamets Hatuf, which is written in the same fashion as a
normal Qamets, does not follow this rule either (admittedly some texts do
use a meteg to help distinguish the two). The Zaqef qaton, the accent
marking a weaker division in a sentence, looks like a shewa less it is
placed above the letter instead of below. Similarly the Segolta, a
disjunctive accent marking a minor break in a line, looks like Segol but is
instead placed above a word. Begadkefat letters were not marked with a
Dagesh until sometime between the 4th and 9th centuries when the vowel
points were added. Yet they appear to have been pronounced differently for a
number of centuries before Dagesh was used to differentiate the "Stop"
pronunciation (with Dagesh) from the "Spirant" pronunciation (no Dagesh).
Even worse is that Dagesh can be a Dagesh Lene or Dagesh Forte depending on
the word, and in some situations a Dagesh Lene can be doubled up like a
Dagesh Forte.

It appears to me that Massoretic Hebrew does have occurrences where a symbol
does "double duty" so to speak.

To bring this closer to home, we can look at English which is full of
examples of one letter representing two sounds. For example the dark and
clear /l/ are represented by the same letter and yet we do not struggle to
pronounce both differently. I never even realized the letter 'l' could
representing two distinct sounds until it was pointed out to me. The word
'lull' even contains both forms and yet native English speakers don't
struggle to differentiate the two, even if they do not realize that they are
doing so. 'Paper' is another example of two allophones of the /p/ phoneme
are used side by side without any physics distinction in English. They are
written the same, yet pronounced differently. Of course these are very
subtle differences; English is ripe with letters that are pronounced
different depending on the word they appear (e.g. 'c' and 'a' in race and
car... and if you are from New England you could add 'r' to that list as
well!)

"Double duty" in Hebrew, and other languages, does not appear to be
uncommon.

Best Regards,

Joshua


------------------------------

Message: 15
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 13:04:48 +0100
From: "Read, James C" <K0434995 AT kingston.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] consonant vowel order of )EHYEH & YAHWEH
To: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT qaya.org>

JCR: <snip>

It's just that 
for a long time i have never understood why every other vowel sign the
masoretes 
used would have been consistent, while the sheva is (reportedly) used both 
vocally and silently. 
The silent scheva seems to be completely redundant as it would simply have
sufficed 
to have left no sign at the end of a syllable. Would anyone have any
difficulty in 
understanding that there is no vowel after the 'he' in )ehyeh? Without the
superfluos 
'silent' scheva of ')eh:yeh'?

And let's suppose that the masoretes did have valid reasons for assuming
that 
indicating the end of a syllable was nessecary. Why would they use the same
symbol 
as that used for a vocal schewa if their intention was to indicate the
opposite?
Wasn't their aim to make a consistent system? Rather than add to the
confusion?

<snip>