[Avodah] Pronunciation of Emet

[Micha Berger]

On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 12:27:15PM +0000, Allan Engel wrote:
: Why, alone among segolate nouns, is Emet pronounced mil'ra?
...
: The obvious answer is that the vowel on the alef is a chataph-segol, which
: cannot be stressed, but this just changes the question to 'why is there a
: chataph-segol on the aleph'?

Emes isn't a segolate noun. The alef's chataf-segol is a form of sheva
na, not a form of segol.

It might be more accurate to define "segolate noun" as part of a
broad category in which the first vowel gets emphasis, and ignore the
actual segols. All such words (that I can think of) get a sheva-qamatz
vowelization in the plural. Nefesh -> nifashos, but also zera` -> zira`im.

It's just entirely outside this class of nouns, despite how it sounds
to people who aren't careful with chataph.

In Yiddish, this is why "sefer" (Heb) becomes "seifer" (Yid), but
"emes" says "emes".

Now for why... Emes is probably from the same shoresh as amein (BDB thinks
so). The sav is a suffix, and the nun dropped off. The stress in "eMES"
is on what is in theory the penultimate syllable, not the last one. But
the hypothetical "emenet" would have been segolate.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Mussar is like oil put in water,
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