Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yodan" <yodan AT yodanco.com>]

Yitzhak and Fred, thank you for the responses.

I'd like to rephrase my question a bit. I'm trying to find out if an ancient
(pre-Tiberian vocalization) pronunciation of the name of Ruth mother-in-law
had an OH vowel sound as the vowel of NUN. This is as opposed to an AH vowel
sound. 

My focus is not long vs. short vowels/sounds, but the actual vowel-sound. 

What I'm referring to as OH is the O in Ohel (=tent) or Kodesh (=holiness),
not like the way the Tiberians pronounced a Kamatz (sort of like AW in
Awesome). 

Based on both your answers it seems to me that an ancient pronunciation was
indeed with an OH sound. 

Do you agree or disagree - and why? And any other responses are welcome.

Thanks and best.

Rivka Sherman-Gold, Ph.D.



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YODAN Publishing
P.O. Box 60655
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Rivka AT Yodanco.com 

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-----Original Message-----
From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Yitzhak Sapir
Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2009 12:29 PM
To: b-hebrew
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] ancient transliterations of names

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
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