Subject: [b-hebrew] Beginner questions about hard/soft pronunciations of bgdkpt
Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:15:19 -0800
Traffic seems low so I thought I'd sneak in a dumb beginner's question
-- actually two related questions representing areas of my ignorance.
The first concerns the differences in consonantal pronunciation between
Biblical Hebrew and what I know as "Sephardic" and "Ashkenazic". (For
simplicity I would like to sidestep other intermediate possibilities of
medieval or Mishnaic Hebrew, but you can tell me about them too if you
like.) I know that one example of the three forms is T=th,t or s. And I
know or think I know that BH w became v in S & A.
The second concerns the rules for reading hard vs. soft b/g/d/k/p/t when
you are looking at text without points (dagesh). About all I know is
that an initial letter is (always? usually?) hard. Are the rules
complete, so that the dagesh is just an aid for people like me; or is
there some ambiguity that makes the dagesh necessary?
[While you're at it you can explain to me what the hard/soft difference
sounds like in the case of gimel and daleth.]
I found a chart online that seemed to suggest that some of the hard/soft
differences didn't exist in BH, but emerged later. Is that right?
Two examples that have me puzzled are:
Rabbi Aqiba vs. Rabbi Aqiva -- which one is right in the sense of what
he called himself?
shabath (shabas, shabat) -- why isn't there an analogous form shavath?
(I'm sure it has something to do with the "doubling" of the b, but I
don't understand how you know that it's "doubled" when the text only has
one.)
Thanks,
Gabe Eisenstein
[b-hebrew] Beginner questions about hard/soft pronunciations of bgdkpt,
Gabe Eisenstein, 02/16/2009