Tiberian Vowels

[Zaarin]

I'm in the process of learning Biblical Hebrew--attempting to learn a reconstructed pronunciation--and first of all I want to thank Zompist for the flashcards. They've been extremely helpful for the vowels, for which my textbook was useless and Wikipedia almost useless. But I still have some confusion about Tiberian vocalization. Is it just me, or does it way overproduce long vowels? E.g., my instinct from other Semitic languages, particularly Aramaic and Phoenician, says that אָב (ʾāḇ) and בֵן (bēn) should be אַב (ʾaḇ) and בֶן (ben). Am I wrong? Does Biblical Hebrew really have Persian-level long vowels?

[zompist]

Omigod, is that ever a can of worms.

The usual transliteration, which I used on my flashcards (and in my upcoming book), and which is used on Wikipedia and in many textbooks, should be taken as phonemic only. Scholars think in terms of the names given in the Masoretic tradition.

When you ask how BH was pronounced, you have to specify which BH? There are basically three answers:

* How modern Jews pronounce it. This can be divided into Ashkenazi and Sephardic traditions. Naturally, these are highly influenced by European languages and Arabic, respectively, and are not how Biblical writers pronounced the language any more than modern pronunciations of Latin are faithful to Cicero. Plus there's the modern Israeli pronunciation which is something of a compromise.
* How the Masoretes who added vowel pointings in the first millennium pronounced it. A complication here is that European Jews (and the Christians who learned Hebrew from them) did not actually know any Masoretes, and therefore interpreted the pointings according to their own contemporary pronunciation.
* How the Iron Age Hebrews, or for that matter the Exile writers, pronounced it, 1000 to 1500 years before. Obviously this has to be reconstructed.

Fortunately one of the best modern discussions of all this is online, that of Geoffrey Khan:

https://www.ames.cam.ac.uk/publications ... cal-hebrew

(Fortunately for Khan, the Masoretes actually wrote a lot about the vowels. But they wrote in Arabic, so this didn't get communicated to the West.)

As to your specific question, my understanding is that proto-Semitic long vowels are mostly preserved in Hebrew, but short vowels can be kept, lengthened, or reduced to ultra-short in complicated ways. The grammars I've read are quite conflicted about how exactly length worked (or didn't) in the Masoretic tradition. (Some think vowel length didn't matter at all; Khan thinks all vowels had length variation; Benjamin Suchard has long vowels /ī ē ɛ̄ ō ɔ̄ ū/ and short vowels /a e o/....)

[Kuchigakatai]

Another thing to be aware of is how the Masoretic vowelling itself was also affected by Middle Aramaic. The use of qāmeṣ (modern Hebrew: kamatz) in the feminine suffix in its default form may be an example of it, and also the lenition written with the absence of the dagesh mark.

And there are differences between Masoretic vowelling and what Iron Age Hebrew was probably like. What is יֹשֵׁב yōšēḇ in Masoretic, whether that meant *[joːˈʃeːβ] (reconstruction with length associated to vowels) or *[joˈʃeβ] (no-length reconstruction) or *[joːˈʃeːːβ] (Geoffrey Khan's reconstruction), may have been more like its Classical Arabic cognate morpheme CaaCiC(un) back when Hebrew was natively spoken circa 500 BC, namely [jaːˈʃib], while méleḵ (*[ˈmɛlɛx] ~ Khan *[ˈmɛːlɛχ]) was perhaps [ˈmalk] or the like (much like Arabic malik(un) [ˈmælɪk(ʊn)], Akkadian malku), and so on.

[Zaarin]

Yeah, my textbook is aimed at pastors and teaches a simplified Ashkenazi pronunciation, but I've been trying to learn a reconstructed Iron Age pronunciation because who doesn't love adding random challenges for oneself while getting one's master's? I will check out Khan's book.

Another thing to be aware of is how the Masoretic vowelling itself was also affected by Middle Aramaic. The use of qāmeṣ (modern Hebrew: kamatz) in the feminine suffix in its default form may be an example of it, and also the lenition written with the absence of the dagesh mark.

And there are differences between Masoretic vowelling and what Iron Age Hebrew was probably like. What is יֹשֵׁב yōšēḇ in Masoretic, whether that meant *[joːˈʃeːβ] (reconstruction with length associated to vowels) or *[joˈʃeβ] (no-length reconstruction) or *[joːˈʃeːːβ] (Geoffrey Khan's reconstruction), may have been more like its Classical Arabic cognate morpheme CaaCiC(un) back when Hebrew was natively spoken circa 500 BC, namely [jaːˈʃib], while méleḵ (*[ˈmɛlɛx] ~ Khan *[ˈmɛːlɛχ]) was perhaps [ˈmalk] or the like (much like Arabic malik(un) [ˈmælɪk(ʊn)], Akkadian malku), and so on.

Wow, that does actually look much more like Phoenician (which has milk, for instance, for Hebrew meleḵ). Could you recommend a source where I could read more about this?

[zompist]

A good person to follow if you're interested in this stuff is A.Z. Foreman. E.g. he does readings of a passage of Deuteronomy at six different periods here:

http://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2020/04 ... lical.html

[Zaarin]

A good person to follow if you're interested in this stuff is A.Z. Foreman. E.g. he does readings of a passage of Deuteronomy at six different periods here:

http://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2020/04 ... lical.html

Awesome! Thank you!