[Avodah] Shva Na's etc.

[Micha Berger]

On a very differen note, I found it easier to remember sheva rules by
recasting them into rules about syllables.

A sheva nach under a letter is the vowel of a syllable.

A sheva na means the consonant is closing the syllable; i.e. we just
finished a "consonant-vowel-consonant" syllable.

So:

Hebrew doesn't have a syllable that is only a consonant. So, the first
letter's sheva has to be na, because the first letter can't be a syllable
all by itself.

(It also doesn't have very many two-consonant dipthongs like /sht/ in
the one syllable "shtei".)

Similarly, by definition, the vowel of an open syllable is a long
vowel. So a sheva under the next letter can't be nach, as that would
have meant that letter closes a syllable with a long vowel in it.

And if a letter is degushah, the second half of the letter starts a
syllable, and the sheva must be that syllable's vowel, so it must
be na.

If the same letter both closed one syllable and opened the next, it
would only be written once, and the Baalei Mesorah would give it a
dagish. So, if you see the same letter twice, you know they must be in
the same syllable, and any sheva must be the short vowel inside that
closed syllable.

(And an os geronois is too faint to close a syllable, so it could
never take a dageish. Except the reish, which the Seifer haYetzirah
says takes a dageish and the two times in Tanakh it gets a dageish
are not exceptional cases.)

This is something Bavli niqud does better than having a sheva nach symbol
(never mind sharing its symbol) and a dageish for a doubled letter. It
instead marks the syllable as closed by putting a line above the letter
that opens it. Whether it's also over the vowel (and all their vowels
are above the letter) or between the vowel and the letter depended on
whether the syllable was closed by doubling the next letter (a Tiverian
degushah) or by just simply using the letter.


And: Rules should be seen as a means of explaining the patterns seen
in the Mesoretic niqud, trop, and margin notes balancing keeping the
rules sane in complexity and keeping the number of exceptions down to a
minimum. It is the individual examples, not the rules, which are to be
treated as miSinai.

:-)BBii!
-Micha

-- 
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