Peter:
That is, if it continued to be pronounced. But could the present use of He as a mater lectionis been the result of pronunciation changes that occured over centuries when the Hebrew language was mainly a read language, and the rules for reading were derived from Greek and contemporary Aramaic pronunciations?
...
From the clues that I see, I theorize that pre-Exilic Hebrewwas pronounced in the pattern of consonant-vowel, in the same pattern as modern Japanese (That's the only place where I think the two languages resembled each other). But that later unstressed vowels were dropped, as well as some of the consonants shifted in their pronunciations. One group of unstressed vowels would have been the final vowels of most words. Another set were unstressed internal vowels that were replaced with shewas.
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