Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu>]

James,

I don't trust my own voice so I am listening to the announcer on the  
American Heritage Dictionary. The 's' in 'slate' appears to me  
shorter than the 's' in 'pencil'. It is slate, but pensssl. Otherwise  
I hear nothing between the 's' and the 'l' in both. Possibly a mouse  
can hear it in the middle of the night. Not me. And if I don't hear  
it then it is not there, and in any event ə is not a vowel.
I suspect that your mind it playing tricks on you. Upon seeing the  
'i' of pencil your eyes incites your brain to restore it by an  
imaginary, fleeting, evanescent, inner voice that you believe  
hearing. It is akin to the common phenomenon of a widow "hearing" her  
departed husband of many years walking in the house, with some of  
them getting from time to time even a glimpse of him reading the paper.
I am afraid you did not understand my point on the 'tiny gap'. The  
gap in XAG GAH is not a result of any phonetic exigency. I insert the  
gap deliberately and hold it long enough, say about 1/24 of a second,  
until the first G is separated from the second.
Otherwise, there are, in my opinion, no "mobile" schwas is Hebrew.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

On Sep 19, 2007, at 11:41 AM, biblical hebrew wrote:

> IF:To convince myself that something indeed hides between the 's' and
> the 'l' of pensəl I would have to record the word, pass it through an
> oscilloscope, observe the Fourier wave decomposition of each of its
> components and analyze its frequency and amplitude content.
>
> JCR: Or you could just explain to me what difference you hear  
> between the 's' and the 'l' of 'slate' with those of 'pencil'. I  
> suspect that you can hear this difference but that you just believe  
> it to be a 'tiny gap'.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> --------
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> --------
>
> 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
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> --------
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> --------
>
>
>
> On 9/19/07, Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu> wrote:
> Jason,
>
> First, it is XAG GAH, '[she] celebrated', not XAGIGAH, 'feast'.
> The question, of course, it what constitutes a "vowel". A consonant
> has breadth and may include some faint, involuntary, miniscule vocal
> aftershocks, depending on its situation in a word. Articulating 'B'
> by itself I do hear the sound of air resonating in my mouth even as
> it is being ejected between my spread lips. But in the combination BG
> the sound of this trailing puff of air is absorbed in the G and it
> becomes BGADIM to my ear. It is possible that some people hear
> "something", to wit: "the shortest and quickest to pronounce vowel
> available to the human vocal system", between the 's' and the 'l' of
> pensəl because this is how they articulate it. As said, I cannot hear
> this whisper of the grass, this, audible to some, $IRAT HA(ASABIM. We
> need to keep also in mind that the distance between hearing something
> and dreaming of hearing it is very short [I am ignorant of the
> essentials of the science of psychophonetics, but am occasionally
> reproached that I hear only what I want to hear].
> To convince myself that something indeed hides between the 's' and
> the 'l' of pensəl I would have to record the word, pass it through an
> oscilloscope, observe the Fourier wave decomposition of each of its
> components and analyze its frequency and amplitude content. But I
> will not do it since I am not interested in this esoteric science of
> phonetics, which, I admit, should be nevertheless of great interest
> to scientists working on computer speech recognition.
> In any event, this discussion of the microscopic nature of this
> metaphysical ə is irrelevant to Hebrew. As you know, a Hebrew speaker
> overriding a schwa does it now by a premeditated, full-fledged vowel
> and not by an incidental squeak. Thus, the question is if it should
> be ,BGADIM, 'clothes', or B[E]GADIM, the same as M[E]GADIM, 'sweets,
> gifts of the earth', is now commonly articulated.
> I think that the pause in MacCoots is long and deliberate.
[cut]