On 10/1/06, Peter Kirk wrote:Well, this is of course hatef qamats, but I take your point that it was
On 01/10/2006 08:45, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
...Yitzhak, are you really claiming that all cases of qamats in Masoretic
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.
Hebrew were always pronounced as "o" and not "a" until after the time of
the Masoretes?
In the Massoretic tradition, yes. In fact, it is not only what I
claim, it is what
modern linguists claim. For example, Geoffrey Khan, in "Tiberian Hebrew
Phonology" in Phonologies of Asia and Africa (1997) identifies qamets as
being phonetically realized as "back, half-open rounded", and then identifies
it as Unicode +0254 (A sort of upside down, backwards e, without the bar).
He later spells the pronounciation of "ship" )NYH as "?enij'je:", where e
represents Unicode 254.
OK. But if qamats was pronounced more like "a" in some dialects, thatThis 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).
That could be explained, and probably is to be explained, as dialect
differences. We know that the Greek/Latin transcriptions do represent
a dialectical variant from Tiberian Hebrew.
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