Biblical Hebrew Forum

[fred putnam <fred.putnam AT gmail.com>]

Dear Rivkah,

Yes, you have understood us correctly: LXX and Vulgate both support the
"long-o" pronunciation of the first vowel in the name of Ruth's
mother-in-law.

Sorry that we [I, at least] were obscure.

Best wishes.

Fred

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Yodan <yodan AT yodanco.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
> *********************************
> YODAN Publishing
> P.O. Box 60655
> Palo Alto, CA 94306-0655
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> Rivka AT Yodanco.com
>
> **********************************
>
>
> -----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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