[Avodah] yehoshua ben nun

Micha Berger micha at aishdas.org
Thu Jun 14 08:23:03 PDT 2012


On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 12:40:09PM +0300, Eli Turkel wrote:
: I thought everyone accepted the pronunciation is from sinai. The discussion
: is only on the representation and names of the vowels which seems to be
: from Tiberia in the days of the Geonim.

The grouping of sounds into which are the same vowel and which aren't is
not etched in stone. In Japanese, /r/ and /l/ are different versions of
the same sound. To Israelis, /ee/ and /i/ are different versions of the
same sound, as well as /A/ and /e/ -- so "paper" often comes out "pepper".
To put it technically, there are different allophones that speakers of
a dialect would group into phonemes. And people who think of two sounds
as being the same phoneme often only hear the difference with difficulty

Then there is the vowel symbol. Qamatz gadol and qamatz qatan share the
same symbol, but are different phonemes, each of which come out as a
range of allophones.

And that's just with one accent. Then we have multiple accents dating
back to the shevatim.

Bavel and Teveriyah probably didn't only argue on the number of vowel
symbols, but also on phonemes. IOW, in Bavel, the vowel on the mem in
"melekh" and in "malkhus" was not only drawn the same, but was probably
pronounced much more similarly. (Which we see traces of this among
Teimanim, who never stopped using Bavli niqud for things like Targum.)

So, what was "miSinai" was at most a range of vowel sounds (or lack
thereof) for each letter in the chumash. Or up to 12 ranges? Someone
then analyzed these 304,805 instances and realized patterns, that they
could be grouped into 5 to 11 vowels or so (plus sheva nach), depending
upon the set of accents they studied. And then they mapped those to a
symbol system to denote them.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             When one truly looks at everyone's good side,
micha at aishdas.org        others come to love him very naturally, and
http://www.aishdas.org   he does not need even a speck of flattery.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                        - Rabbi AY Kook



More information about the Avodah mailing list