Re: Jewish names

On Tue, 1 Aug 2000 13:13:30 -0400 Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...> writes:
>That is, hholam-malei (AFAIK mostly representing earlier diphthongs
>in -w, contracted by the Mazora times) becomes <o:>, while single
>hholam (mostly from Semitic [a:]) is rendered as <o:y">...
Steg responded:
"I have my article by Cornell's Professor Gary Rendsburg about Biblical
Hebrew Phonology here somewhere, but not infront of me.....but i thought
that hholam-hhaseir is generally from [u], like in the Hebrew/Arabic pair
_qodesh_/_quds_."

   To my limited knowledge, hholam-malei often markes a PCS *[a:] and
hholam-hhaseir is often from PCS *[u].  However, this is not always the
case.  In many portions of the Bible the orthography is defective - as I
understand it, the existence of hholam-hhaseir was necessitated by situating
the vowel [o/o:] in its proper place, regardless of the existence of a vowel
letter.
   As far as I can recall, there are two camps with regard to Biblical
Hebrew Phonology.  The camp following Kimhi (the quantitative school) holds
that there are five vowels in BH, distinguished by length, and the
Non-Kimhians (the qualitative school) maintains that there were seven vowels
in Biblical Hebrew, distinguished by quality (and therefore not marked for
length).  The argument centers around the pronunciation of patah/qames and
seghol/sere.

-Chollie


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