[Avodah] [Mesorah] Fwd: Chad Gadya

[Mandel, Seth]

From: Danny Levy <danestlev at gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2019 1:27 PM
> May I take this opportunity to ask another question about Aramaic dikduk?
> In Kaddish, ul'olmei olmaya and da'amiran b'olma, do they have kamatz
> gadol and therefore shva na, or kamatz katan and therefore shva nach,
> or is Aramaic dikduk different from Hebrew and therefore "therefore"
> is incorrect?

Therefore is not correct. 'olmo in Aramaic have a qomatz in both places,
from the time of the book of Daniel at least. At that time the R'DaQ
had not been born.

Aramaic had qomatz and patach. How you pronounce them is your business,
but they were different Aramaic vowels. Neither one was more godol than
the other; two different Aramaic vowels.

The R'DaQ invented theories about the qamatz gadol, qatan, for Hebrew. The
evidence from the Masorah is that he was incorrect in his theories. But
assuming he was correct, he spoke about Hebrew grammar, not about Aramaic.

So: was the sh'wa in Aramaic 'ol'mo pronounced or not there at all?

The answer to the question phrased that way is the same answer to the
question posed by the famous poem Antigonish, :

Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today

If you claim it is a vowel, then it is there. But is really there? Is
it really a vowel? In the Babylonian punctuation, including of Sefer
Doniel, there is nothing there. In Tiberinan punctuation, the lack of
anything indicates that the consonant is not pronounced, so they wrote
a sh'wa. Was it every pronounced? Very doubtful.

R. Mazuz, if you are looking for a current day rov who understood the
issues, claims that the rules of the R'DaQ for Hebrew sh'wa and qomatz
do not apply at all in Aramaic, and so it is not pronounced.

This is actually relevant to Pesach, although one level removed! Chometz
on Pesach is like the man who wasn't there in Antigonish. In the houses
of most Ashk'naz Jews, it is there in the house, but it is not "there
in the house."

So chometz is the sh'wa of the Jewish yomim tovim, or, more exactly, it
is the man in Antigonish. And, so you see, orginally from Nova Scotia,
where Antigonish is a town where the man who wasn't there wasn't from.

Rabbi Dr. Seth Mandel

{Dedicated to R. David Bannett}