Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Vadim Cherny" <VadimCherny AT mail.ru>]

Thank you. I couldn't find Arabic text to check, but my English translation
says nothing of narrowings and openings, but specifically mentions the u, i,
a sounds.
I don't understand, how could qamats be "wide narrowing" and patah "wide
opening". And how is tzere a "short break"?

> The schewa is not said to be always vocal.  What the text means is that "a
schewa can be a vowel like any of these seven qualities, under certain
conditions."
In my Hirschfeld's translation, "shewa is sounded with all these [vowels]
under certain conditions."

Vadim Cherny

> That is not what Halevi writes.  Chapter 80 in Part II is quite long.
> A translation from
> 1905 is available at:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Kitab_al_Khazari/Part_Two
> (Search for "I should like to ask whether thou knowest the reason why Jews
move
> to and fro when reading the Bible?").  Very simply, the seven kings of the
> Tiberian Massoretes (the seven vowel qualities iin Tiberian Massorah)
> are divided
> according to their similarity to the three principal qualities in
> Arabic.  My Hebrew
> translation labels these as three as Narrowing (qibbuc), Opening (ptixa),
and
> Break ($eber).  According to this method, there is a wide narrowing
(qamats),
> a medium narrowing (holam), and a narrow narrowing (shuruq).  There is a
> wide opening (patax), and a narrow opening (seghol).  There is a big break
> (xiriq), and a short break (cere).  It is clear that none of this has
> anything to do
> with the length of the vowel itself, but rather with the way the lips are
> situated when the vowel is sounded.
>
> Yitzhak Sapir
>
>
On 12/11/06, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
> On 12/11/06, Vadim Cherny wrote:

> > Shewa always vocal.

> That is not what Halevi writes.  Chapter 80 in Part II is quite long.
> A translation from
> 1905 is available at:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Kitab_al_Khazari/Part_Two
> (Search for "I should like to ask whether thou knowest the reason why Jews
move
> to and fro when reading the Bible?").

This appears in the same text but slightly better formatted in
http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/khz/khz02.htm#page_128

 It is the
simple vowel quality without any additional lengthening, and if there
is additional
lengthening other than the simple vowel, it will have a vowelless
consonant after
it." The vowelless mater lectionis is a little system of the
Massoretes where they
identified after a long vowel a mater lectionis in all cases like in
Arabic.  However,
sometimes this vowelless mater lectionis would be "hidden" and so would not
be
written, but from the Massoretes' point of view, this vowelless mater
lectionis still
existed.  Because of this vowelless mater lectionis the schewa was no longer
a
schewa, because in a syllable closed by some vowelless consonant, you don't
use
a schewa.  If the vowelless mater lectionis was not there, not even
hidden, but there
was some other vowelless consonant, you had a short syllable whose length
was
as short as the schewa vowel, but because of the vowelless consonant, the
schewa
would not be written and instead the full vowel sign would be written.
 This was
still considered "longer" than the "pure simple vowel" because the vowelless
consonant would be sounded in this case, and this sounding of the consonant
was
an "additional lengthening" to the vowel/syllable.  As for the quality
of the schewa,
when a schewa was followed by a guttural, it took upon itself the vowel of
the
guttural.  Thus, the word thwm is pronounced [toho:m] with the schewa taking
the quality of the vowel "o" which is everywhere else a long vowel.

Yitzhak Sapir