Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dr Raoul Comninos" <capechurch AT gmail.com>]

No serious scholar of the Hebrew BIble would ever disregard the
evidence of Greek or Latin testimonies since these sources antedate
the massoretes by hundreds of years. Besides, the point is that Greek
and Latin evidence CONFIRM the Tiberian Vocalization of Shewa as
sometimes a full vowel. Therefore for one to argue that shewa is never
vocal runs in the face of all three testimonies. There are many other
examples besides SODOM. See Sperber GRAMMAR, 105-229.

On 9/8/07, Peter Bekins <pbekins AT fuse.net> wrote:
>  >>Still, the most commonly cited example of a vocal shewa is
>  >>S'DOM,which becomes SODOM in the LXX.  It's a bad example,
>  >>beause SD--- is an impossible start to a Greek word.   (We
>  >>see similarly issues in the American pronunciation of "Sri Lanka."
>  >>Almost everyone says"Shree..." because Enlglish words cannot start
>  >>with the sounds SR---.)
>
> Joel, I don't have anything constructive to add to the larger
> question of vocal/silent schewa, and I agree in principle that the
> Greek evidence should be taken with a grain of salt, but doesn't
> Greek usually break initial consonant clusters with a prothetic
> vowel? Ie, they would have pronounced it /Isdom/ or something like that?
>
> [Sri] --> [Shri] is not quite the same thing, I haven't studied it in
> detail, but at first glance this seems like an allophonic shift of
> [s]-->[sh] before [r] since we Americans pronounce a retroflex [r].
> If you say a flap [r] then [sri] is fine. We do allow consonant
> clusters to begin with [s] in general.
>
> Peter Bekins
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