Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Karl wrote:
> What both of you ignore is how both
> the speaker and listener perceive the
> syllabic divisions, irrespective of how
> it is pronounced.

On my part, I consciously ignored how the listener perceived it (and the 
reason I gave the clarification of "the way that your sentence is 
pronounced"). At that moment I was focused more on his error of dividing 
it, I was looking at the sentence as it was uttered, not necessarily as 
it was perceived.

You are correct, it is a matter of sloppiness when pronouncing the 
sentence, and that sloppiness is the norm for most general speakers of 
English (an exception being the mentioned people who have been trained 
to enunciate everything they say clearly). In this particular situation, 
the D in "would" geminates, but this is an artifact of how it is 
generally pronounced, not a necessarily a matter of how it is perceived, 
and — as history shows — not a matter of how it would be written down 
(as it clearly would be perceived as two words — which happen to be 
monosyllabic — "would" and "you").

On the question of Spanish speakers dividing "pala", I think most would 
divide the syllables as "pa" and "la" but would correct someone who said 
"pa-la" enunciating "pal:a" (a geminate-L) as their example. I chose the 
"pala" example because it was the one where I was first personally 
corrected in my pronunciation of Spanish many a moon ago (and thus, it 
has become my own personal example to others). The person who corrected 
me (Joe, a construction worker) told me (in not so politically correct 
terms regarding caucasian individuals) that spanish consonants are 
sometimes "long", and his voiced correction to me was "pal:a" (except 
that he really drew out the length of the L to emphasize it).  It's not 
just with "pala" but a large number of other words. When it comes to why 
write one L versus two Ls, "pala" would not be the best example because 
there is a reason not to write two Ls in spanish since an LL is a 
different letter (on its own) with a different pronunciation (a Y-like 
sound). However Ls, Rs, Ms, and Ns (as well as sibilants and fricatives) 
are easier for a beginner to hear a geminate sound (since the sound 
carries no matter how long you make the consonant), while with plosives, 
a geminate consonant ends with the stop flavour of the consonant 
(followed by silence in the amount of additional length, if any, the 
person gives the letter, with the tongue in stop position, almost as if 
the person has been frozen in time) followed by the plosive flavour of 
the consonant.  In these geminate stop/plosive consonants, the stop half 
of the geminate letter does not have a schwa after it, the sound is 
literally stopped in place with /no/ further articulation until the 
plosive half begins (the stop half almost sounds like the sound was 
clipped at the end). An audio example for you would be really helpful 
here. :)

I fully agree with you that Tiberian Hebrew ≠ Biblical Hebrew. However, 
it sounds like you would contest that Biblical Hebrew did not make use 
of geminate consonants to differentiate meaning of words... Is this your 
view?  If so, my first question would be: Why would BH be different than 
other semitic languages on this count?

--
Ratson Naharädama
Denver, Colorado