Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Vadim Cherny <vadimcherny AT gmail.com>]

Randall Buth wrote:

>> Penultimate vowel in pausal position is elongated to avoid
interrogative intonation.

> However, those vowels record information that fits with
the comparative, etymological development of the language.
For example, when sham`u 'they heard' is pausal it "becomes" shame`u
with an 'e' vowel, not the more phonologically appropriate 'a'
vowel that would fit the pharyngeal consonant. This suggests that
the 'e' vowel and the pausal form was in place before the 'e'
vowel reduced to shva in the 'contextual form'.

It's hard to seriously argue that the Masoretes, people with very  
basic skills in grammar, somehow recorded etymological forms which  
were lost more than a thousand years before them. And recall that we  
have no evidence of pausal elongation in Secunda. Moreover, it is  
*shamau which would be a phonetically odd form as it will erode into  
shamo. Thus their choice of e is reasonable on purely phonetical  
grounds.

Vadim Cherny