Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

> > Now, when you pronounce waw in YHWH as v, syllable-final guttural hey is 
> > no problem (I don't suggest that pronunciation, just following your 
> > example) if you distinctly syllabify the word, yh.vh or even yh.(bh)h. 
> > When, however, you use soft w-u, such stop is almost lost, and hey 
> > disappears.
> > Since, however, hey does not take schwa, hey was vocalized, and yeh.wa 
> > became ye.ho.wa.
>
> When sheva under a guttural consonant becomes vocalised, the vocalisation 
> is always a composite sheva and always matches the preceding vowel. So 
> there is no way that an "o" vowel, or any kind of long vowel like the 
> holam often postulated, could have found its way into the divine name by 
> this kind of process.

The first vowel is more or less "a," thus composite schwa is with "a," too, 
as you correctly noted.
Short a do become o - short o. Consider davAr - *dAvar - dOivor. In 
Ashkenazic, first kamatz elongated to holam, while the second kamatz, now in 
closed unaccented syllable, actually shortened to short o sound. The same 
process created kamatz-katan out of kamatz. I wouldn't bet about the English 
pronunciation, though the effect seems to be there, but Russian examples are 
plenty: малина is more or less pronounced молина.

Vadim Cherny