Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 06/10/2005 21:16, Dr. Joel M. Hoffman wrote:

> ...
>
>
> It's not a prosodic rule.  It's not hard to find examples in Tanach of
> the same prosody with different trope types, and, hence, different
> BEGED KEFET behavior.  The Masoretes invented this arbitrary
> inter-word rule (and, actually, for all we know, invented the entire
> BEGED KEFET rule).
>  

This last part sounds improbable to me. The Masoretes recorded what they 
heard, in the tradition of chanting the Bible which they knew. So they 
must have heard a distinction corresponding to dagesh, and heard that 
the dagesh pronunciation was not used after a vowel even in a previous 
word within a short phrase. And there is surely pre-Masoretic evidence 
for the different pronunciations of begadkepat letters in 
transliterations into Greek, Latin etc.

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