[Apologies, Isaac, the system didn't like the PDF, so I've put it all in the email.]
My point was really (and I didn't make it clear) that this Andalusian
usage fits almost flawlessly with the voiced shewas and ḥaṭūphīm as
we've come to expect them learning Hebrew via Weingreen and Gesenius
(i.e. outwith the living spoken Israeli Hebrew tradition). Here are four Andalusian poems I've . The Abulafia was the
first one that came into my head, while the three Shemuel ha-Nagid poems
were the first that came to hand in differing metres (I had meant to
include another short poem in hazaj, but this was at hand. The
other also behaved itself metrically as far as I checked).
But of course while this confirms the quantity, it says nothing about the quality - all
these ḥaṭūphīm could
be indistinct shewas in isolation, as you suggest, as far as the metre
goes. Metre at least has nothing to say on this issue, just on the vowel
length!
John Leake, Open University.
Voiced shewa in four
short Andalusian Hebrew poems
redindicates voiced shewa used as regular short
greenindicates silent
shewa where voiced expected
bluewaw indicates וּwhere voiced
shewa/ḥaṭūphexpected metrically (an
apparent Hebrew licence) Note: All metric schemata run left-to-right.
Theבְat the start of
the second hemistich in line 1 seems to close the syllable rather than be
voiced. I don't think there's any Arabic licence here to replace a single long
syllable with two short ones (i.e. reading /ū.və-/ for /wə.və-/) (though that
would often work in Greek poetry), so I think this must be either a Hebrew
licence or perhaps the poet's actual usage whereוּבְ-starts a word. This is rather like modern Israeli
usage, isn't it?