Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Jason Hare" <jaihare AT gmail.com>]

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word is Yi$MoR [yishmor], even if the cholem has been replaced by a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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