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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Inseparable Prepositions and that shewa

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  • From: Vadim Cherny <vadimcherny AT gmail.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Inseparable Prepositions and that shewa
  • Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2010 22:57:03 +0300

Vadim Cherny wrote:

The Masoretes, sorry, did not write anything on grammar. Saaida wrote
centuries after them.
Michtav has dagesh while $imchem doesn't - would you suggest any
conceivable difference between them which have led to different use of
dagesh kal?

The Masoretes did write works on grammar. Saadia was contemporaneous
with Ben Asher (vocalizer of the Aleppo codex). Ben Asher himself wrote
the Diqduqe Teamim. Even later works, such as the Hidayat al Qari are
valuable and provide a consistent understanding of the Masorah. These
were written by people who were still trained in the authentic Tiberian
tradition.

The reason mikht@v does have a dagesh is because historically there
was no vowel between the kaph and the taw while in the case of the
work $imkhem there was a vowel. Furthermore, a pronoun like -khem
is very prone to linguistic leveling.

Yitzhak Sapir



Ben Asher and Saadia lived three or four centuries after the Masoretes introduced their notation. Even in our time, when knowledge in transmitted much more accurately than in their age, commenting on 17th- century works is hardly is straightforward matter. Unlike Saadia, we have access to the LXX and Secunda. And to call diqduq a clear instruction would be a bit of overstatement.

The Masoretic tradition has dagesh kal even in Aramaic texts - do you seriously believe that every other Aramaic author was wrong in omitting them (as far as I know)?

You mean the vowel between root and suffix chem, like in the DSS's dvarac? Why, the development seems just the opposite: epenthetic vowel sneaked between root and suffix in vulgar speech, something that the Masoretes would have glossed over. And this brings us to another question, why no epenthetic vowel (thus dagesh) in ctavtem?

Instead, we can view dagesh kal as an attempt at resyllabification for clear pronunciation, which would explain the absence of dagesh in - chem and its presence in -tem, since the semantic intonation is different on nouns and verbs.

Vadim Cherny






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