Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Herman:

What my teacher taught was that shewa has no 
sound, and that there was no exception. Hence in 
his reckoning shtaim was no special case. He made 
no effort to explain the presence of the dagesh 
in the tau.

As for the Masoretes, I now think that they 
merely reproduced the tradition as it had been 
passed down to them, warts and all, even if it 
didn't make sense. It is the efforts of modern 
grammarians to make sense of these points that 
give us so many headaches.

Karl W. Randolph.

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Herman Meester" <crazymulgogi AT gmail.com>
> 
> I would like to ask the interested members' opinion on the origin of
> the word שתים shtayim.
> Remarkably, this word has a shwa with the shin, but a dagesh in the taw.
> A so-called shwa na` (mobile) is supposed not to be followed by a
> sharp begedkepet consonant sign: it should have a soft
> "veghedhkhefeth" variant, if the shwa we are dealing with had once
> been a vowel - i.e. if it really is a shwa na`.
> 
> Of course, to the Masoretes there was only one shwa: representing the
> absence of a vowel.
>...
> 
> Now I was wondering, what have the members heard of their teachers,
> when they first learned Hebrew, regarding the shwa-issue? I have the
> feeling that, often, certain absolute phonetic laws are proposed to
> students, which in practice are subject to so many exceptions, that it
> would have been better not to have mentioned these in the first place.
> Another aspect of this, see above, is that diachronic and synchronic
> grammar are often mixed up.
> 
> Herman

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