Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

>> 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

* * *

Well, there are lots of cases where the Masoretic vowels preserve stuff
from earlier stages of the languages. As for the Secunda, it is 'a'
witness, but not always the most reliable for the best preservation.
(for that matter, Greek had lost phonemic length by that time.)

As for your a+u = o hypothesis, you
left out the `ayin, so there is no expectation for reduction.
And note some pharyngeal sister-pausals:
laqaHu 'they took'
and nasa`u 'they travelled'.
Neither one has an etymological
'i/e' vowel, and both have the expected 'a' forms.
shame`u 'they heard', on the other hand, reflects its 'stative'
'i/e' etymology. Chalk one up for the Masoretes.
A hypothesis needs to cover wide data.

PS: please use the original heading. I get enough spam without
having my email blasted in the header of an e-list.
Your profuse apology is accepted.

Randall Buth

-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicallanguagecenter.com
Biblical Language Center
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