Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 1/6/07, Peter Kirk wrote:

> I think I may have been confused here, partly because of the small size
> of the Hebrew pointing on my screen. I thought the claim was that the
> sheva under xet or resh was mobile. But I now see that there is also a
> sheva under zayin and mem, which I had misread as hiriq. So this is
> supporting the traditional position that the "r" and "m" form a
> consonant cluster in Hebrew, although they don't in Greek, Latin or English.

Yes, that seems to be the case.  I remind you that I spot (and variously note
on this list) many cases in which in situations with two consecutive short
vowels, the second one often (always?) drops.

> > I don't follow.  In any case, Ibn Ezra's names of the vowels include
> > qamats gadol = our qamats
> > qamats katan = our tsere
> > patah gadol = our patah
> > patah katan = our segol
>
> I am making a different point, against one you made earlier, than Ibn
> Ezra is implying two different pronunciations of (our) qamats. I think
> your explanation of his terminology doesn't affect my argument, although
> I am using the modern terminology. To put it more bluntly, if "the
> schewa is always as the vowel which follows", and when the vowel that
> follows is a long qamats the sheva is pronounced like patah, an "a"
> sound, and not like any kind of "o", that implies that the long qamats
> is an "a" sound, not an "o", and so distinct at least from hataf qamats.

The rule that a schewa is of the sound as the guttural that follows is
a generalization to which the second rule (with the qamats) is an
exception.  Perhaps this situation began prior to the a: > ɔ: sound
change and after it took place, the "a" schewa sound was
maintained in these situations.   Because of words like [be)e:r] "well",
we see that the phonotactic restriction was apparently maintained (or
else the short e would have become a segol and been written with a
hataf segol, due to the short e > segol sound change which followed
the long a > qamats change).  So apparently the patah before a guttural
was sufficiently stable that it prevented the guttural from continuing to
affect the schewa.  There are phonetic transcriptions of qamats that
show a with a small o on top, but I am not sure if that is IPA or what.
In any case, one has to distinguish qamats from both a and o.  I
think it is less significant how that distinction is made.

> Actually the same is seen in the Masoretic punctuation for gutturals, as
> in the paradigms of verbs with guttural letters: a silent sheva is
> regularly replaced under a guttural by a hataf matching the preceding
> vowel as follows:

I agree that there are such cases where a guttural that originally had a
schewa takes the quality of the previous vowel rather than the schewa
taking the quality of the following vowel.   However, this is why there are
signs for hataf patax, hataf segol and hataf qamats, and why they are
consistently always marked under gutturals.

Yitzhak Sapir