RF:
The Masoretes would not dream of inventing anything new. They were extremely
careful to point and vocalize the text exactly as they heard it recited in
the synagogue. However, the recitation of a narrative text would probably be
different from the recitation of a hortatory or future text. My suggestion
is that verbs in a narrative text were recited with retracted stress,
causing a closed syllable with patah and gemination (the WAY- prefix), while
this was not the case with hortatory and future texts (which got the
WE-prefix). Since patah and shewa were pronounced similarly, this was for
the Masoretes simply a matter of stress and intonation and not a semantic
distinction. But later grammarians misunderstood this, and ascribed a
semantic
distinction to the difference between WE- and WAY-, and the consecutive
model was born.
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