[Mesorah] aleph with a dagesh

[Mandel, Seth via Mesorah]

1) the Masorah is not a grammatical work and is solely descriptive.
2) the answer to many questions of the Masorah is often buried deep within the Masorah, as the studies of the ge'ayot shows. There can be no reasonable attempt at understanding features withou understanding the totality of the environment, not just the word.  To that I was alluding when I mentioned the occurrences of the word vayyishchat. When you look at the entire environment the different trop used with the word make a lot of sense.


Rabbi Dr. Seth Mandel

On April 16, 2017 at 1:21:18 PM EDT, Sholom Simon <sholom at aishdas.org> wrote:
Without getting into the debate of whether grammar is descriptive or
prescriptive . . .

I guess the question is: why do those particular words have an
alef-dagesh? Is there any grammatical reason at all? Or, is the
answer: "we don't know, but that is the mesorah on those words"?

At 12:22 PM 4/16/2017, Mandel, Seth wrote:

>I am not a chasid of all the attempts to uncover meanings in the
>Masorah before people understand the Masorah.
>
>The Masorah was not a composition of grammatical rules. It was an
>attempt to commit to writing the traditional way of
>chanting/reciting the Biblical text. The Masoretic apparatus was
>part of that, a way of making sure that the way words were written
>and pronounced were preserved.
>
>The tradiition was that the aleph was realized as a glottal
>stop. In almost all languages with such a phoneme, it is sometimes
>elided and sometimes stressed, in addition to the normal pronunciation.
>
>Just as the Masorah shows which cases the aleph is elided (by not
>having any vocalization and a rafeh sign above it), it shows the
>places where it is stressed by putting in a dagesh.
>
>Only after understanding the totality of the Masorah would d'rushim
>become appropriate. As was the case in Parshat Tzav, when various
>d'rushim of why the vayyishchat with a shalshelet reflects
>hesitation: the drush is based on ignorance of the Masorah, and
>ignorance of the intricacies of trop.
>
>
>Rabbi Dr. Seth Mandel

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