Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Jason,

I am sorry, but I am afraid you are deluding yourself. I am listening  
very carefully to the intonation of 'vertical' on the American  
Heritage Dictionary on my computer desktop and fail to hear anything  
in it but 'verticl', with the 'c' and the 'l' abutting with not even  
a wisp of thin wind coming between them.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

On Sep 20, 2007, at 7:38 PM, Jason Hare wrote:

> Isaac,
>
> First, I did not say Xa:GiYGfH (festival, celebration). I used |  
> (vertical bar) as a divider between XfG- and -GfH to represent the  
> division between the parts.
>
> Perhaps, "pencil" was a bad example for the demonstration of /ə/.  
> How about the word "vertical" above? The syllable -cal contains a / 
> ə/ that is very clear. Try to pronounce the word vertical with an  
> "a" vowel, either /ɑ/ or /æ/, and you will see that it doesn't  
> work. The sound produced there is very obviously *not* an "a." It  
> is /ə/, which is the same sound that many of us hear in "pencil."
>
> It is also the sound we hear at the end of "nation" : /'ne.ʃən/.  
> To most of us, this sound very naturally exists in both English and  
> in Hebrew. Many now pronounce /ə/ as a full vowel, though, as you  
> have stated. This is another issue entirely. All phonologists agree  
> that /ə/ exists and is used regularly.
>
> Jason Hare
> English Teacher
> Wall Street Institute (WSI)
> Rishon Lezion, Israel
>
> Isaac Fried 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.