comments follow this of Kevin: Kevin: The lentition of the letters bgdkpt is usually placed much later. Many think it came in after the Exile. So the answer is no, no C12th BCE Hebrew speaker would have known of this. But after it did become part of Hebrew, yes, ordinary speakers would notice. Anyone who used the wrong variant would have sounded either 'wrong' or 'foreign', just like in languages today that have the same phenomenon.
This brings us back to a point often made: the Hebrew we have in the Masoretic texts represents the way Hebrew was chanted in the second half of the 1st millennium CE. As part of the tradition of Hebrew, it is part of the evidence of how Hebrew was spoken in the 1st or 2nd millennium BCE, but it is not, nor was it meant to be, a trascription of how Moses, David or Ezra pronounced Hebrew. Kevin Riley On 5/11/2010 1:27 AM, fred burlingame wrote: > that make life fun ... > > and so, in numbers 31:23 we have three instances of the hebrew word באש > occurring, but we have pronunciation differing; "ya-vo ... va-esh;" > "ta-ah-vi-ru ... va-esh;" and "ya-vo ... ba-esh." > > Is there some rule or reason to "dagesh" for "ba-esh" only once of three > instances? > > Would the average 12th century b.c., shepherd or farmer practiced (or even > known about) such subtle differences in his every day communications? > > Thanks for your help. > > regards, > > fred burlingame Kevin is correct in general about bgdkpt and potentially sounding foreigh or strange in not following the patterns. However, the example of Num 33.23 is special and relates to how fast one is speaking. Normally, following a vowel the bet in 'with fire' would have been pronounced as a fricative, (probably like the bilabial 'b' in Habana [Havana in English] and later as a labiodental 'v)'. However, if a speaker paused for half a moment the bet was considered to be beginning a phrase and would be pronounced as a stop 'b'. In the MT of Num 33, the third example is accented with a 'disjunctive' accent before the bet. Thus, the pause would be heard and reinforced by the stop 'b' continuing a new phrase unit. This illustrates the sub-phonemic status of the b/v alteration in biblical/ post-biblical times. If a speaker spoke the verse above quickly enough then all of the bet's would have been fricatives. Randall Buth -- Randall Buth, PhD www.biblicalulpan.org [email protected] Biblical Language Center Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
