Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On 1/7/07, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com> wrote:

> > 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.

I think that some of the rules stated for the schewa also relate to the
guttural taking the preceding vowel.  Thus, in the word [be)e:r] "well",
the actual development appears to be *bi)r > *be)r > *be)er, and the
guttural is really taking the preceding vowel.  In Massoretic terms,
however, this is written with a schewa before the guttural.  Other
examples, such as THWM [toho:m] would appear to represent
a more ancient pronunciation.  Compare cognates tiha:m and dhira:(
for THWM [toho:m] and ZRW( [zoro:a(] but also Amarna Canaanite
zu-ru-uh which could be taken to suggest that the form *qita:l >
qoto:l by Amarna times, but in the Massoretic transcriptions
this was maintained only in cases where the middle letter was
a guttural.  In other words, the rules for a schewa as indicated
combine both a guttural truly being influenced by the previous
vowel and also other situations.

Yitzhak Sapir