I think I may have been confused here, partly because of the small size
of the Hebrew pointing on my screen. I thought the claim was that the
sheva under xet or resh was mobile. But I now see that there is also a
sheva under zayin and mem, which I had misread as hiriq. So this is
supporting the traditional position that the "r" and "m" form a
consonant cluster in Hebrew, although they don't in Greek, Latin or English.
> I don't follow. In any case, Ibn Ezra's names of the vowels include
> qamats gadol = our qamats
> qamats katan = our tsere
> patah gadol = our patah
> patah katan = our segol
I am making a different point, against one you made earlier, than Ibn
Ezra is implying two different pronunciations of (our) qamats. I think
your explanation of his terminology doesn't affect my argument, although
I am using the modern terminology. To put it more bluntly, if "the
schewa is always as the vowel which follows", and when the vowel that
follows is a long qamats the sheva is pronounced like patah, an "a"
sound, and not like any kind of "o", that implies that the long qamats
is an "a" sound, not an "o", and so distinct at least from hataf qamats.
Actually the same is seen in the Masoretic punctuation for gutturals, as
in the paradigms of verbs with guttural letters: a silent sheva is
regularly replaced under a guttural by a hataf matching the preceding
vowel as follows:
Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.