If you'd taken the slightest trouble, you'd
have found out that whoever vocalized the consonantal
text, heard distinctly two different 'A' vowels.
Correspondingly they were given different markers.
One was a Qamatz, another a Patach, and related to
the last, a semi-vowel hataf-patach. There is no point
in explicating the differences bweteen long and short
vowels here. For one thing, Proto-Semitic may raise
its ugly head. Just dust off your old elementary
grammer books.
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