I don't quite understand. Do you mean "stop" as a synonym of "plosive"? If so your final statement remains untrue, for all BGDKPT letters with dagesh are now as always pronounced as plosives.kal, ...Modern spoken Hebrew completely lost schwa and dagesh, certainly dagesh
Not true. It still has dagesh kal distinction in bet, in pe and in kaf,Obviously. But I explain later on that I believe both dageshes marked the
i.e. quite different sounds corresponding to presence or absence of
dagesh kal.
same feature: a stop, of which gemination and plosification were
environment-specific consequences. That stop is now lost.
I said something different. "If" schwa and dagesh were quickly lost in a
century from ben Yehuda's reconstruction, these features are phonetically
uncomfortable. Therefore, "these" particular features could not persist for
millennia. No doubt, natural features, such as gemination, perfectly
persisted.
...
I'm not sure I follow your meaning. LXX and even 11th-century Cyrillic Bible
have fricatives where MT indicates dagesh kal. ...
SOME other masoretic marks, the accents, are used only
for chanting. But there are many good reasons for distinguishing clearly
between the vowel points used for normal pronunciation and the accents
used for chanting.
I would be careful to speak about the "normal" pronunciation of vowels. ...
... They
are "not" pronounced as Masoretes intended (Ashkenazic, Sephardic). Some
vowels (segol, hatafs) just could not be pronounced in speech any
differently from the corresponding longer vowels. Little doubt that so
intricate differentation of vowels could not survive for centuries to be
heard by Masoretes.
The masoretic vowels make perfect sense only for singing, where these small
differences are perceptible.
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