Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 8:04 PM, Rivka Sherman Gold wrote:

> Does anyone on this list know what was the LXX, Vulgate, or another ancient
> transliteration of the name Nun-Ayin-Mem-Yud (the name of the mother-in-law
> of Ruth)? Or can anyone point me to a source where the answer can be found?

As noted by Fred, the LXX transliterates the name with an omega.
This probably conveys the pronunciation: [no:(mi:] where o here is
really a qamats
sound.  Because of the omega, we (probably) know the vowel was long.
This is the
case for accurate transcriptions of words from the Hexapla, but I'm not sure 
how
accurate the situation is for the Septuagint.
Also, we know the vowel was like "o" rather than "u" because an "ou" would
have been used for transliterating long u:.  It seems to me that it was 
probably
a long qamats sound, and omega was the closest sound to it.
The epsilon is probably used to convey the guttural, which in this case closed
the syllable.
In later Hebrew, gutturals "slid" backwards into the vowel, so this is
what gives
the hataf qamats that follows the qamats, and the open vowel.  But the
Septuagint
is recording a pronunciation centuries beforehand.
Therefore in this case the long qamats is "original."  In many cases, the 
qamats
is the result of a very regular shift whereby long "a:" became long qamats.
However, in this case, the long qamats was there even before the shift.

It is wrong to view this as a differentiation between two qamats vowel sounds.
Rather, there were different reflexes in pronunciations to different
original vowels.
In Tiberian, both long qamats and long patah merged to become long qamats.
Elsewhere, long qamats and long patah remained distinct.
Later, in Tiberian, short patah lengthened in some cases to become long patah.
So Tiberian ended up with long patah and long qamats just like in other
vocalization systems.  Just that it placed them in different situations than
the other vocalization systems.

Yitzhak Sapir