Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

> On 9/4/07, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
>
> What kind of guidance?  Telling whether the schewa is vocal or not? Or
> on how to pronounce it?

On 9/4/07, Dr Raoul Comninos wrote:
> Yitzhak,
> I meant both kinds.

Dr Comninos,

You have to realize that the Massoretes were not writing for students, they
were writing for other Massoretes -- an encyclopedic knowledge of the
Hebrew Bible was assumed.  Their method of identifying verses of the Bible
was to cite the first few significant words of the verse.  Specifically, there
were various roles such as a scribe who would write out the book, and a
vocalizer who would go through vocalizing all words and making corrections.
In such an environment, a vocalizer did not have to figure out how to
pronounce a certain word -- because it was already taught to him orally.
The vocalization of the Bible was not intended to define all details of the
pronunciation explicitly and unambiguously, nor was it something that
developed full-fledged out of the blue with no overlap between signs.  It is
wrong, therefore, to conclude that "if they distinguished between shewa and
hatep shewa, it must be, in my view, because the one sound different from
the other."  The hatafim were developed out of a need to further define the
schewas that were ambiguous beforehand and are ambiguous still today.
You might ask, why then, don't all the vocal schewas have hatafim?  Well,
as time went on, more and more vocal schewas were marked by hatafim.
The manuscripts we have today are based on a certain stage of the
Massoretic vocalization, that of the 10th century, but later stages in the
11th and 12th centuries did employ more hatafim.  The second issue is
that they were not always necessary.  As I pointed out, the ambiguity in
recognizing the schewa as vocal is limited to only some very few cases
where there are like consonants.  You can get over these for the most
part by studying other cases where these are used, and so make up
for oral teaching you did not get but is an expected prerequisite of anyone
who learns the Massoretic writings.  Today, you can also study the
Arabic transliterations found in the Cairo Genizah, and this will give you
precious information on the length of various vowels.  When you consider
that all this study does not even compare to the amount of study the
Massoretes themselves did, you will see how lucky you are!

As for the pronunciation of the schewa or hatafim when vocal, we are on
more solid ground.  You can see what I wrote here:
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/b-hebrew/2007-January/031206.html

Yitzhak Sapir