[Avodah] Shva Na's etc.

Micha Berger micha at aishdas.org
Sun May 19 04:48:52 PDT 2019


First, my apologies to everyone on the crossed wires when I said
it was better to explain the sheva rules as syllable rules. The
words "sheva nach" and "sheva na" were flipped in my head as I
typed the first part of it.

That email ought to have read:

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

A sheva [na] under a letter is the vowel of a syllable.

A sheva [nach] 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....

(This tangent and the one about not taking rules too seriously, deleted.)


On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 03:42:29PM -0400, Zev Sero via Avodah wrote:
: It was certainly not run by amei-haaretz -- it was run by the
: then-LR's son-in-law, later to become the LR.  But he himself said
: that it was prepared in haste and they didn't have time to get
: everything perfect...

Which is quite different than finding one of the minority of siddurim that
mark shevas, and marks them following the rules of a minority opinion,
and using that as your base text.

Between it being the future LR who chose a text with the Razah's shevas
and the other, non-sheva evidence that the Baal haTanya followed the
Razah, I can see why many concluded that he probably held like the Razah
when it came to shevas as well.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
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