...Yitzhak, are you really claiming that all cases of qamats in Masoretic Hebrew were always pronounced as "o" and not "a" until after the time of the Masoretes? This is an improbably claim, as is surely demonstrated by transliterations as "a" into Greek, Latin and other languages, from say 3rd century BCE (LXX) to 4th century CE (Jerome). For example, if the names of Hebrew Bible characters which ended in -YH or -YHW, with qamats under the yod, were pronounced -yo or -yohu in Hebrew of this period, why do the Greek and Latin forms of their names uniformly end in -AS and not -OS? Many more such examples could be given.
Having actually looked up evidence now, I need to correct that above
explanation. Like the "long a to o" shift, Phoenician had a similar shift in
"short a". Hebrew probably did too. The qamats represents those situations
that "short a" became "o" among others. Under Arabic influence, those "short
a" cases that became "o" were now read as "a" again.
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