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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] CV syllables, was music in Hebrew

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  • From: Rochelle Altman <willaa AT netvision.net.il>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] CV syllables, was music in Hebrew
  • Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 01:03:59 +0200

At 11:16 PM 1/29/2006, you wrote:
Yitzhak asked:-

>What are tin ears

I case no one else has answered. Its a slang term for someone who cannot
distinguish some sounds. For example, Americans often cannot distinquish
between the New Zealand pronunciation of ``pin'' or ``pen''. Other have
trouble distinguishing between ``race'' and ``rice''. One could say such a
person, or people, had a tin ear. The statement about the Masoretes having
tin ears is the same. The claim is that they could not distinquish various
vowel sounds when they added the pointing to the consonantal text.


My reference was musical. Tin ears means someone who lacks appreciation for music because of difficulties distinguishing or sounding notes.

Then, when you come down to it, the Masoretes do not display fine ears for anything. They were accountants, bean counters, and they just went by the numbers and copied what was in the texts at their disposal. If 14 texts has X+. and 12 had Y- ,by gum, X+ it was -- whether it made grammatical or musical sense or not. .That is what Kimchi was commenting about and why for various reasons I suspect that they _probably_ had tin ears also.

If folks are going to quote someone, please do try to get it right.


Bill Rea, IT Services, University of Canterbury \_
E-Mail bill.rea AT canterbury.ac.nz </ New
Phone 64-3-364-2331, Fax 64-3-364-2332 /) Zealand
Unix Systems Administrator (/'


R. I. S. Altman, PhD




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