On 25/07/2003 11:01, Jony Rosenne wrote:
But consider the seventh word in Jeremiah 52:19, which, as you would
encode it, ends qof hiriq yod zaqef-qatan vav holam tav.
(This hiriq yod
vav holam sequence is in fact unique in the WTS Bible text.) In this
case, is the yod a consonant followed by a holam-vav vowel, or is the
hiriq-yod a vowel followed by a consonantal vav and a simple holam
vowel? (How would this actually be pronounced in modern
Hebrew, with a V
sound of not?) BHS prints holam above the right side of vav, implying
that the holam-vav is understood as a vowel, and has a footnote that
many manuscripts and editions have a dagesh in the yod, which
makes this
understanding unambiguous.
It is a Holam, rather than Vav Haluma, i.e. a vowel. The Dagesh doesn't make
a difference.
The pronunciation raises no difficulty, even when presented without points,
as it is a feminine plural.
Thank you. I wonder if it is safe to assume that any yod or vav with
"dagesh" immediately preceding a vav-holam is consonantal, i.e. neither
a hiriq-yod full form vowel nor a shuruq, and so the holam-vav is a
vowel. This rule seems to apply to the Bible text, but I don't know if
it does to all Hebrew texts. There is a more general algorithm to
distinguish the two vav-holams, but it is messy and potentially
recursive to the start of the word - consider the pronunciation of a
word consisting of a long string of vav-dageshes and a final vav-holam!
In my bible it is the 14th word. The Maqaf only affects the pronunciation,
not the word count. Otherwise the word count would change when the text is
marked up with the Maqaf.
Good point. But the WTS text which I was basing this on does not count
maqaf as a word break. Perhaps it should.
--
Peter Kirk
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
