I think that the real question about the Kamatz katan is not when itsIt is surely clear from the Masoretic accentuation rules that qamats could be either long or short, as can hiriq and qubuts. But I agree that the distinction may well have been of length only, not of quality. However, it is common in languages for length distinctions to develop over time into quality distinctions. This is especially obvious in English, in which long and short "a" would originally have had the same quality but since the 16th century have had very different qualities (in fact this is true of every simple vowel in English). This is probably the simplest explanation of how the two varieties of qamats came to have different qualities.
pronounced - the rules are pretty clear, though there are different
customs. The real question is, why the mesoretes used the same symbol for
two different (albeit related) vowels: the long a and the short o. Could it
be that THEY pronounced them both the same? If so, how, as a long a or as a
short o?
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