Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>]

Since I've already responded to a couple of posts on a sub-topic of this
thread (Asenneth &c.), I may as well give my two cents to the issue of qamets
gadhol vs. qatan:

1) In Masoretic Hebrew (by which I mean the Hebrew pronunciation that the
   Masoretes tried to reflect with their vowel and punctuation marks), the
   alteration in word forms between qamets and pathah on one hand (e.g., כָתַב
   vs. מָצָא) and holem and qamets on the other (e.g., קֹדֶש vs. קָדְשִי) can 
hardly
   be explained by other than that at one level qamets represents a "long a"
   corresponding the "short a" pathah, and qamets represents a "short o"
   corresponding the to "long o" holem.

2) Even though it seems clear that one must posit synchronic phonological
   rules to account for long vowel vs. short vowel alternation, surface rules
   may cause both long /a:/ and short /o/ to be realized as the same surface
   phoneme.  It seems likely that the reason the Masoretes represented the
   reflex of /a:/ by the same symbol ("qamets") as the reflex of /o/ was they
   were the same, or almost the same, in their pronunciation (most likely
   [ɔ]).

   A fairly close parallel can be found in most varieties of American English,
   where the long "broad a" sound in the word "father" has fallen together
   with the "short o" sound in the word "top".  In the American English case,
   the "o" sound has become derounded and vowel length no longer phonemic; in
   the Hebrew case, the "long a" sound became rounded, and any vowel length
   distinction was not phonemically important enough to be represented by the
   Masoretic vowel points.

   This doesn't preclude vowel length distinctions to be present both in
   English and MH at a phonetic level, but that it was not phonemically
   important.

3) That the falling together of /a:/ and /o/ was not universal in Hebrew is
   shown both by the post-Masoretic pronunciation of qamets gadhol as [a] in
   the Sephardic tradition, and by the pre-Masoretic transcription of Hebrew
   name into Greek.  We find e.g. Αδαμ/Adam for אָדָם, not Ωδωμ/Odom in the 
LXX,
   as we might have expected had the vowel been rounded at that time and
   period.  (This also has a parallel in English, where the distinction of
   "broad a" [ɑ:] vs. "short o" [ɔ] is maintained in British English.)

-- 
William Parsons