Re: an announcement...

>On Thu, 23 Sep 1999 19:17:07 -0700 Barry Garcia
><Barry_Garcia@...> writes:
>> dnsulani@internet-zahav.net writes:
>> > What is more interesting, perhaps, is that there are also rules for
>> >writing
>> >words "imported" from another language in Hebew letters without
>> vowels!
>
>> I have always wondered about that! I wonder for instance, how would
>> my
>> name be rendered =)? I find the semitic scripts interesting that you
>> can
>> get away without writing in the vowels and still understand the
>> words.
On 24 Sep, Steg wrote:
>
>Probably:
>bet - (alef) - reish - yud
>gimel - (alef) - reish - samekh - yud - hei/alef
>
>There'd probably be those _alef_s in there to mark the As.
>I'm not sure whether an Israeli would use _hei_ or _alef_ to mark the A
>at the end of Garcia....i'd use an alef.
  I just asked my (sabra) kids. I asked each of them in a different room to
write
a name that I would pronounce for them, in Hebrew, as if they were beginning
a letter to the person. I realize that a sample of 2 isn't very
statistically
significant, but for what it's worth, here are the results:
They both wrote the name Barry Garcia :
bet - reish - yud    gimel - reish - samekh - yud - hei

But understand that I pronounced the "a" in "Barry"  with a mid front vowel
([E] ?).
My kids (who are in high school) told me that, had the name been
pronounced with (what I would call) a low vowel ([&] or [a]) they would have
spelled "Barry" as bet-alef-reish-yud, adding the alef to indicate lowness
of vowel.
(So Barry, how do you pronounce it? )
In "Garcia", I pronounced it with the stress on -ci-.  The unstressed nature
of the first syllable tells them not to put an alef in. Writing it as
gimel - alef - reish would mean that it was pronounced with the stress
on the first syllable and/or the first syllable's /a/  was [a:]
(lengthened.).

Dan Sulani
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likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a.
A word is an awesome thing.