Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>]

Traffic seems low so I thought I'd sneak in a dumb beginner's question 
-- actually two related questions representing areas of my ignorance.

The first concerns the differences in consonantal pronunciation between 
Biblical Hebrew and what I know as "Sephardic" and "Ashkenazic". (For 
simplicity I would like to sidestep other intermediate possibilities of 
medieval or Mishnaic Hebrew, but you can tell me about them too if you 
like.) I know that one example of the three forms is T=th,t or s. And I 
know or think I know that BH w became v in S & A.

The second concerns the rules for reading hard vs. soft b/g/d/k/p/t when 
you are looking at text without points (dagesh). About all I know is 
that an initial letter is (always? usually?) hard. Are the rules 
complete, so that the dagesh is just an aid for people like me; or is 
there some ambiguity that makes the dagesh necessary?
[While you're at it you can explain to me what the hard/soft difference 
sounds like in the case of gimel and daleth.]

I found a chart online that seemed to suggest that some of the hard/soft 
differences didn't exist in BH, but emerged later. Is that right?

Two examples that have me puzzled are:

Rabbi Aqiba vs. Rabbi Aqiva -- which one is right in the sense of what 
he called himself?

shabath (shabas, shabat) -- why isn't there an analogous form shavath? 
(I'm sure it has something to do with the "doubling" of the b, but I 
don't understand how you know that it's "doubled" when the text only has 
one.)

Thanks,

Gabe Eisenstein