Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Jonathan Mohler <jonathan.mohler AT gmail.com>]

To Isaac and Aviel:

The Masoretic pointing does not represent vowel grammar as much as it represents phonological phenomenon.  What they attempted was to produce a phonetically accurate representation of what happens at the phonological level.  Long, short and shewas are as common as flies in most languages.  As native speakers of English we do this instinctively.  We are not as aware of it, simply because we do not write what we say.

Take for example, the word COMBINE; if we were to represent this word with Hebrew signifiers and masoretic pointing, we would obtain the following:

כְּמבָּין. Notice, in the first syllable– COM, we write an "o" but speak a shewa; In the last syllable–BINE, we write the "i" but we speak the diphthong "ai," and we ignore the final "e" altogether because its role is only to let us know the i is long.

Now let's convert the verb COMBINE to the noun COMBINATION.  The first thing that happens is the stress shifts from the second syllable (BIN) to the third syllable– NA.  This stress shift affects the whole word phonologically.  In American English, the first syllable lengthens just a bit from כְּמ to כָּמ (qamets-chatuf). The second syllable shortens to בֱּנ. The third syllable carries the stress, and is thus long– נֵי. The final syllable is a shewa– שְׁן.  So using the MT system COMBINATION looks like this: כָּמבֱּנֵישְׁן.

Another important principle at play here is the notion of duration.  When one utters the word "decline," they lengthen the stressed syllable so that the duration of the utterance matches that of the word "declension" for instance.  Properly speaking, one could say that what is occurring is a shortening of the second syllable in the noun "declension" in order to preserve the perceived length of the verb "decline".

So in Aviel's example, the word YAD is long.  If you think of it as two beats of time, the short vowel would be one beat, while a vocal shewa would be a half-beat. When YAD takes on the suffix CHEM, several things are happening. The stress shifts to the suffix, and the speaker subconsciously wants to preserve the duration of the unsuffixed YAD.  Also, the resulting chateph-pathaq yields to the e-type of the CHEM and becomes an e-type shewa.

Isaac, the fact that -CHEM is grave supports my theory that it was initially -CHAYIM (-KAYIM), i.e. pluralized -CHA (-KA), which contracted to CHEM.  It is grave (long), because the speaker is subconsciously trying to match the length of the original -chayim.

Jonathan E. Mohler