Amen (Re: Pater Noster (purely linguistically))

On Saturday, December 4, 2004, at 08:28 , Steg Belsky wrote:[snip]
> In the time of the Masoretes, who invented vowel diacritics for Hebrew
> texts, "amen" seems to have been pronounced something like [O'men] -
> one or both of the vowels might be long, though.  This was around the
> 800's CE.
>
> It may well have been pronounced something like [a'men] back around the
> non-year 0, though :) .
The Greek makes it quite clear that the 2nd vowel is long. Whether the 1st
vowel is long or short is impossible to tell. The word was accented on the
second syllable - strictly a pitch accent in Greek at that time but
possibly already changing to stress in some areas. Thus:
[a'me:n] or [a:'me:n] in Greek of the 1st cent CE.

Ray
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
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