Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rochelle Altman <willaa AT netvision.net.il>]

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
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R. I. S. Altman, PhD