Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>]

    To elaborate a bit about Jason's paragraph bellow , and this
elaboration deals directly with a B-Hebrew subject:
 
 
   The dagesh in the Tav of of )AT.FH ( attah) is there for a clear
reason: the word is based on the ancient proto-Semitic form
*ANTah , preserved in the Arabic ANTA, so written and
pronounced to this day. The N has disappeared and assimilated
 almost completely by the time BH was written down,  but left
a trace in the pronounciation of the next consonant. The Masoretes
heard it, and marked it with a dagesh.
 
   There are many such cases; observe for instance the
conjugation of P"N verbs in the imperfect, Qal.
 
   This, hopefully, will be one answer to the original question
 
             Uri Hurwitz                                                      
            Great Neck, NY
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
"This is why we have to write אַתָּה )AT.FH and not אַתָה )ATFH, even
though the latter appears in explanations of modern Hebrew in basic
textbooks. The dagesh is not important for modern Hebrew
pronunciation, but the Massoretes must have thought it represented
something in speech, else they would not have included it! It surely
represented the same thing in that stage of Hebrew as the shadda does
in classical Arabic, the elongation/doubling of a consonant."




>From kwrandolph AT gmail.com  Tue Feb 24 18:29:45 2009
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Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:29:44 -0800
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From: K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Any meaning to the Dagesh?
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David:

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 8:51 PM, David Kummerow 
<farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>wrote:

>
> Well, in your example, if you were to remove the dagesh from /haššomer/,
> then how do you determine interrogative heh vis-a-vis definite article,
> since the definite article vis-a-vis interrogative heh is determined by
> the presence/absence of dagesh?


Context.

When reading the unpointed text, there are no dagesh to tell between the
definite articles and interrogatives, therefore context is the only
determinant. And really, it is pretty easy to recognize the difference.

>
> Regards,
> David Kummerow.
>
> Karl W. Randolph.