Biblical Hebrew Forum

["JAMES CHRISTIAN READ" <JCR128 AT student.anglia.ac.uk>]

Hi all,

recent discussions have reminded me of a point which I 
have never really fully resolved in my mind. The whole 
point of the Massoretic pointing system was to preserve 
the pronunciation by introducing *non ambiguous* 
representation of vowels.

Why would the massoretes betray this goal by giving 
the point which represents Schewa a dual role? And so, 
I guess what I'm really asking is, is there any real 
evidence that Schewa was used by the Massoretes to 
close a syllable rather than to represent a vowel?

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James Christian Read - BSc Computer Science 
http://www.lamie.org/hebrew       -  thesis1: concept driven machine 
translation using the Aleppo codex 
http://www.lamie.org/lad-sim.doc  -  thesis2: language acquisition simulation

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