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  • From: "Jason Hare" <jaihare AT gmail.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Question about Pi'el Imperfect
  • Date: Thu, 17 May 2007 10:02:45 -0500

John,

Of course, this is NOT the case with Israeli (or Sephardic) Hebrew.
The qamats is pronounced 'a' (like father) when long and 'o' (like
hole) when short. We do not generally talk about the Tiberian system
when we discuss the sounds represented by these letters in terms of
how they should be pronounced NOW in order to be understood properly
(that is, by people who use standard Hebrew pronunciation as it is at
this time in history).

I agree with what Pere Porta has written above regarding the short
qamats and its equivalence to the cholem ('o') in this situation. The
word is Yi$MoR [yishmor], even if the cholem has been replaced by a
qamats qatan in a situation as described by Pere.

Yours,
Jason Hare
Joplin, MO -> Ra'anana, Israel

On 5/17/07, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com> wrote:
A qamats always sounds like the 'ou' in "bought" and a holam always
like the 'oa' in 'boat'. The qamats can be long or short and the holam
just so happens to always be long but only because the way Tiberian
Hebrew developed, all short holams were eventually lost or lengthened.
The qamats (as any other vowel) is long when the syllable is stressed
(even secondary) or open. Sometimes a short qamats appears in an
open syllable and then it is denoted by a hataf-qamats. It is generally
accepted that n) is actually a development of an earlier energic form
yaqtulun(n)a, while the imperfect is a development of an earlier
yaqtulu, as per Rainey. One should therefore keep in mind that what
we have here is likely not simply a change of vowel (which is
significant in itself), but a possibly different verb conjugation altogether.

Yitzhak Sapir
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