Biblical Hebrew Forum

["biblical hebrew" <jcr.bhebrew AT gmail.com>]

Hi Isaac,

the sound which you are failing to hear in the final syllable of pencil is
the sound I was talking about. It is the shortest and quickest to pronounce
vowel available to the human vocal system and is the kind of 'uh' sound you
make when you sit up on the side of the bed after a heavy night. It is the
sound you make at the end of every single English consonant when pronounced
out of context. Try pronouncing 'b', 'd', 'f', 'g', 'h' etc. out of the
natural context of a word. Are you starting to notice a similarity yet? That
sound that comes at the end of each of them is the vowel in question. And it
is this very vowel that enables us to speak English so quickly and which
makes spoken English so darn difficult to follow for students of English
whose language does not have such a lazy vowel.

But this brings us on to the following question. Were the Massoretes as
phonetically aware as modern formalisms of phonetics? Or was what they
called a silent schewa just as silent as you believe your 'tiny gaps' to
be?  i.e. very much vocal?

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James Christian Read - BSc Computer Science
http://www.lamie.org/hebrew       Thesis 1 - Aleppo codex machine translation
http://www.lamie.org/lad-sim.doc  Thesis 2 - language acquisition simulation

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On 9/17/07, Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu> wrote:
>
> James,
>
>
> I am sorry, but I am not succeeding in phonetically relating to this
> graphical symbol /ə/, which indeed all say "is the most common sound in the
> English language". Listening even to a good talking dictionary I hear
> nothing in 'hard' but hard, and nothing in 'pencil' but pensl. I would not
> know what to do with pensəl. Is /ə/ indicating that there exists an
> ephemeral, tiny-tiny, ether filled, gap between the 's' and the 'l', or is
> /ə/ just standing there in memoriam of an evaporated 'i'?
>
>
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