Biblical Hebrew Forum

["omar nshea" <omarnshea AT gmail.com>]

hiya everyone,

i keep coming across the reference that the tiberian masoretic vowel signs
show only the quality of vowel to choose from but not
the quantity of that vowel.
this is  and seems to have been accepted acorss the board in modern
philology and linguistics.
does anybody know where the idea stems from? does it turn up in the medieval
sources anywhere?

also, why is it that prepositions have one type of vowel when standing
independently (e.g. segol) and then change when inflected,
(e.g. sere) and then change even furthur when they are heavily affixed (e.g.
hateph)? is that not evidence of length of vowel?

bg cheers.
omar