Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ratson Naharadama <yahoo-arch AT heplist.com>]

James Christian:
> In reality the segmentation is
> 'woul' and 'dyou' to produce
> two CV syllables.

Actually, this would not be accurate. You are correct if you would say 
that the way that your sentence is pronounced would not produce the 
syllable division as "would" followed by "you" (which is what you did 
imply, so you are correct on that). However, the way that the sentence 
would be parsed for syllables would not produce "woul" and "dyou", 
neither.  What it would produce (with most average English speakers, we 
will ignore those persons who have been trained to enunciate a sentence 
like this to produce "would" and "you" as clearly separate syllables) 
would be the syllables "would" and "dyou".  What happens in English 
speech in this particular situation is the gemination of the final 
consonant of "would" (the consonant becomes "long").  Spanish speakers 
can frequently point out foreigners speaking spanish not only because of 
vowel accent, vowel lengths, vowel colouring, and consonant colouring, 
but also in that many Spanish consonants are pronounced geminate, even 
though they are written with one letter (and the fact that most English 
speakers aren't even aware of gemination). For example, "shovel" written 
in Spanish is "pala" but it is pronounced with a geminate-L producing 
"pal-la" (if you said "pa-la" to a Spanish speaker, their first response 
will likely be to ask What? even if you are already holding a shovel in 
your hand).  While this doesn't really change the meaning of the word in 
many cases (it does in some cases, and more often it does in, the 
related, Italian language), in the Semitic languages, gemination is an 
essential meaning changer in the language.  For example, geminating the 
second consonant of a verb frequently strengthens the meaning of the 
verb (to break something becomes to utterly destroy or to shatter 
something). If you geminate the firs consonant of a noun, you make that 
noun definite (indefinite yôm (a day) becomes ayyôm (the day)). In 
Arabic and Hebrew, the real use of the alif or heh in making something 
definite is not the value of the consonant (in Arabic, this use of alif 
does not carry its own sound, it is silent, the same is true for ancient 
Hebrew, but it is frequently pronounced in modern Hebrew), but to carry 
a vowel in front of the consonant that is to become geminate.

If a consonant can be geminate in Semitic languages, then why in all of 
the consonantal scripts of these languages do they write them with only 
one letter? Because , just like in Spanish, they saw it as one letter, 
only its length was different (not the number of letters).  However, 
when you look at a semitic syllabic text and compare it to its 
equivalent consonantal text, you will see not only long and short 
vowels, but also long and short consonants spelled out.
--
Ratson Naharädama
Denver, Colorado