...My point is that segol, as I have heard it pronounced anyway, is more like IPA epsilon, or French e grave, than ae diphthong. But pronunciations vary - and also, as I discovered in Azerbaijan, there are significant differences between British and American perceptions of the boundary between e sounds and a sounds. So I won't push the point.
Surely open e or e grave would be phonetically more appropriate (and more compact) than ae diphthong for segol.
Could you explain this a bit more? As I say, I got ae from
Saenz-Badillos. The IPA epsilon is another option--my choice of ae was
mostly for mechanical reasons, since it's an easy symbol to use in
LaTeX.
...I just looked again at my 51 examples. In all but three of the alef is preceded by patah or segol, and so the syllable is unambiguously closed. There are just three cases where there is ambiguity, given here in M-C encoding (the list standard):
...
Quiescent alef has no pointing, and so is distinguished (but only non-finally) from non-quiescent alef which is pointed at least with sheva. Your system would lost that distinction. There are just 51 cases in the WLC e-text of alef with sheva, all following a vowel and followed by a consonant, which in this system would not be distinguished from quiescent alef
Would any of them fail to show the distinction in voweling that we
should expect? For instance, just looking at Gen 4:23 as your first
example, the patah preceding alef shows that the syllable is treated as
truly closed. Again, it's not ideal to place this much burden on the
reader, but then again, how often will it really matter whether or not
the shva is present?
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