Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

Hi Rolf,

I've just gotten home and in checking my email I see much more has been 
written. I hope to write more in the morning, but before I head off to 
bed again (the reality of being a human!), just a quick question 
regarding your response to Herman.

> RF:
> The Masoretes would not dream of inventing anything new. They were 
> extremely
> careful to point and vocalize the text exactly as they heard it recited in
> the synagogue. However, the recitation of a narrative text would 
> probably be
> different from the recitation of a hortatory or future text. My suggestion
> is that verbs in a narrative text were recited with retracted stress,
> causing a closed syllable with patah and gemination (the WAY- prefix), 
> while
> this was not the case with hortatory and future texts (which got the
> WE-prefix). Since patah and shewa were pronounced similarly, this was for
> the Masoretes simply a matter of stress and intonation and not a semantic
> distinction. But later grammarians misunderstood this, and ascribed a
> semantic
> distinction to the difference between WE- and WAY-, and the consecutive
> model was born.

I am wondering what your evidence for pathah being pronounced similarly 
to shewa is? I thought that that shewa only approached such a 
pronunciation when it received the ga'ya accent. I could be wrong, but 
then I am also convinced that the grammaticalisation of Hebrew by the 
stage of the Masoretes meant that a seven vowel system was in place. 
This has bearing on the pronunciation of shewa and syllable structure.

Everyone else seems to argue the other way round to you: everyone else 
seems to argue for two forms with different semantics, the reason for 
which they are used in different text-types; whereas you seem to argue 
for one form being used across the board and then only secondarily 
becoming differentiated.

What do you make of the differences in the hiphil?

What do you make of word order and mood, that is, do you agree with 
Holmstedt, Niccacci, Cook, etc that modal word order is prefix verb 
first and indicative word order is prefix verb second? Do you agree that 
the more fixed word order in this regard is due to the two forms (ie 
jussive and indicative verbs) have become the same (except for some 
verbs in hiphil) due to grammaticalisation?

Regards,
David Kummerow.