Recent Notes On Hebrew Pronunciation

By Rabbi Avi Grossman

Edited by Mr. Jonathan Grossman 

Many of the ideas discussed in this article were in my notebook for some time, and just as I was getting around to preparing them for publication, my prolific colleague Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein sent a copy of Professor Geoffrey Khan’s The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew to me. After reading it and briefly corresponding with the author, I concluded that it was time to release this article. Professor Khan invites the yeshiva world to read his book, available for free at this link, and to check out his website. Full disclosure: although Prof. Khan’s research is enlightening, not only do I not agree with or endorse everything he claims, I do not believe that certain points are admissible as halachic sources in the Bet Midrash. 

With regards to the details of halachic pronunciation, I have already released my own book wherein I try to show how the rishonim would pronounce Tiberian Hebrew, and I direct readers to Rabbi Bar Hayim’s videos on the subject. Rabbi Bar Hayim follows the views of Rabbi Benzion Cohen. All of us are attempting to recreate something that we cannot really know, and for now, we still have to debate the fine details. I seriously doubt that the Masoretes spoke a ritual Hebrew that sounded exactly the way any of us describes it. 

Before getting into the nitty gritty of Prof. Khan’s arguments, I would like to introduce some basic ideas that can be gleaned from an elementary, comparative study of Arabic.

A few years ago I took some classes in modern spoken Arabic, which I hoped would help me begin to read Maimonides’s original writings. Aside from helping me realize how there is so much I have to learn about that language, it helped me learn more about Biblical Hebrew. Fifteen years ago, when I started working on what would become my aforementioned book about Masoretic Hebrew, I wondered about certain missing consonants. Thankfully, those and many other questions I had have been somewhat answered, and I now wish to present some of my own findings. I realize that for some, these may not be so novel, but my intention is to bring them to the attention of those in the yeshiva world who, for whatever reason, would enjoy learning about this but will not come across these issues in their regular courses of study.

Concerning the Consonants:

Arabic has only a cursive form, unlike our Hebrew which has had over the course of time many forms, including the common, Assyrian block form and the various cursive forms, which thanks to the advent of modern-Hebrew education has become much more standardized. Also, many letters have up to four forms: the isolated (stand-alone) form, the initial form, which the letter takes at the beginning of the word or in the middle of the word when the previous letter is cursively non-connective, the medial form, and the final form. For some letters, there is significant overlap. See a chart here, for instance. 

The Arabic letter alif is basically the Hebrew alef, but it is used much more often as a mater lectionis, the Latin translation of the Hebrew אם קריאה. (See below.) 

The Arabic equivalent of bet, ba, is always strong, meaning that in most forms of Arabic there is no letter that represents the weak bet sound, that of V, while the Arabic equivalent of pei, fa, is always weak, and never strong.This means that in most forms of Arabic there is no letter that represents the strong pei sound, that of P. Thus, many native Arabic speakers have a hard time pronouncing foreign words that have the P or V sounds. Today, in Israel at least, the solution is to use the stop, B, to also represent the P, thus giving us words like بيانو, biano, for piano, while the V sound is a variant of the fa, ف, and sometimes it is marked with three dots on top instead of one to indicate the V. Consequently, Israelis who pronounce their surnames that begin with vav in the standard, European-influenced accent, e.g. Vaynshtain instead of Weinstein, have the Arabs spell their names with a variant of fa. 

Unlike in Hebrew, the diacritical dots you find above and below certain Arabic letters are not vocalizations but rather critical components of the letters. It seems that early on the diacritics were used to distinguish between alternate sounds created by single letters, like the dagesh qal is and was used to distinguish between sounds made by single letters, while other letters originally had unique forms, but evolved into identical forms, and the diacritics were introduced in order to preserve the distinctions. The initial and medial forms of the Arabic letters ba, nun, ya (the equivalent of the Hebrew yod), and ta (the equivalent of the Hebrew tau) are orthographically identical and distinguished by the diacritics, the ba with one dot below, the ya with two; the nun with one above, and the ta with two, even though in all of the earlier Semitic alphabets, the equivalent consonants had distinct forms. This has made Arabic very receptive to new letters: it is very easy to modify an already existing letter form by adding anywhere from one to three dots as a superscript or subscript. In Hebrew, we still have not completely assimilated new consonantal symbols into new letters (the ג׳, ץ׳, ז׳, etc.), and the typical method of representing them looks out of place in context. 

Gimmel: In many languages, the hard G sound has been assimilated to a soft one, and this is as true in Arabic as it is with certain English words. However, the Arabic jim is not always pronounced like a J, which, as I pointed out in my book, is a combination of the D sound followed by a voiced shin (SH) sound, or the voiced equivalent of the CH sound achieved by clustering the T and SH sounds. Rather, jim makes the voiced shin sound (the G in massage) on its own. Also, the jim is still pronounced like a hard G in some countries, such as Egypt. 

Dal is the Arabic equivalent of our dalet, and it, like our dalet, has a weak, fricative counterpart, the dhal, (as in “the”), although unlike Hebrew, in which the weakness or strongness of the bet, gimmel, dalet, kaf, pei, or tau (the “beged kefet” letters) depends on the form of the word, and one set of rules governs all of these letters, in Arabic it seems that dal and dhal no longer have such a relationship, and as above, are now considered separate letters. 

The Arabic waw serves the same purposes as our vav. More on that soon. 

Het has its equivalent in the Arabic ha, while the sound of our kaf’s weak counterpart, khaf, appears in Arabic as a variation of the ha, pronounced kha, and the latter is represented by writing the former with an additional upper dot: ح and خ, respectively, while the one with a lower dot, ج, is the aforementioned jim. This seems to indicate that the weak sound of the khaf that distinguishes our Hebrew so much from English is a historical latecomer, and that while we first made it a variation of kaf, the Arabs made it a variation of het, and indeed, since in most Jewish circles the het is pronounced (incorrectly) as a khaf, perhaps the Arabs were just anticipating us. Many academics claim that the sound migrated; even in Hebrew the sound of the khaf was made by the het in certain words, but later, when all hets were pronounced alike, the sound was given to the weak kaf. This would explain why, for instance, certain proper nouns have been historically transliterated unusually. E.g., Jericho, Rachel, etc.

The Arabic counterpart of tet is the ta, but unlike our Hebrew tet which has no voiced counterpart, like tau has dalet and samech has zayin, the Arabic ta does have a voiced counterpart, the dad, ض, which is the D in words like Ramadan. Just like English transliterations of Hebrew commonly lose the distinction between tau and tet, they also lose the distinction between dal and dad, and in many systems used to teach Arabic to Hebrew speakers, they simplify the dad and tell them that just like they always pronounce the tet like a tau, they can pronounce the dad like a dal.

The Arabic counterpart of the yod is ya, and it pretty much behaves like the yod, but has traditionally been used as a mater lectionis even more than yod has. For example, many transliterations of Hebrew into Arabic not only use the ya to represent the Hebrew tzeirei, they even use the ya to represent the segol in open, accented syllables.

I was asked concerning the yod in second-person-possessive male suffixes, as in, for example בנֶיךָ ba-NE-cha: if the yod is not meant to be pronounced as part of the segol vowel, why is it even there? My proposed answer is that it is there to distinguish the singular from the plural, along the lines of the silent yod in the third person counterparts of those nouns, for example in בנָיו ba-NAW, which most never even get around to wondering why we do not pronounce as ba-NAYW. I believe that the yod in words such as בניו may have once been pronounced, and this explains the suffix’s relationship to its Aramaic counterpart, וֹהִיx or וֹיx. In essence, the two languages present the combined sound of the low vowel with the two semivowels, just that in Hebrew the Y sound preceded that of the W, whereas in Aramaic the W sound preceded the Y. Similarly, up until the common era, decisors would represent the western sound of “OW” (as in “brown” and Ashkenazi surnames with “baum” in them) in Yiddish and Yiddish-influenced written Hebrew as וֹי, “oy,” despite the inaccuracy. In any event, the silent yod in the plural possessive suffix is a critical indicator of the plural state, even more so than the potential vav of the holam in words like אבֹתֶיך  and עֹלֹתֵיכם. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of these words are written in the Torah with the yod and not the vav, and even when there is no need for a possessive or constructive suffix, the vav of the (generally) feminine plural suffix is usually omitted. Rather, the holam is usually written plene when the vav (or the yod that it replaces) is part of the root of the word. Thus, there is always a vav after the first tau in the word Torah (of the root yod-reish-silent hei) and its derivatives, but more often than not there is no vav after the reish indicating the plural of Torah.)

Sometimes, at the end of words, the alif is in the form of a ya minus the two lower dots that  distinguish the ya from the ta, ba and nun. Such an alif is called an alif maqsura (a “shortened alif”), and is often used in place of the ya that was part of the root word. See below for how this may relate to the phenomenon of the equivalency of yod and silent hei as the third letter of many Hebrew roots.

The Arabic counterpart of kaf, ka, is always strong. This would remind us of the instances in which the suffix khaf in Hebrew is strong, as in ארוממךָּ, although in spoken Arabic, what was once the sound of qamatz/patah after the suffix ka has now been placed before the kaf, such as in possessives that end with the sound “ak” instead of “ka.”  Similarly, the possessive suffix is pronounced “kha” in Hebrew, while in Aramaic it is pronounced as “akh.” 

The Arabic counterpart to lamed, lam, is often orthographically combined with the alif that precedes it or comes after it. Certain Hebrew printers would use a combined letter for alef and lamed; I do not know who learned from whom (no pun intended), or if it is just a coincidence. 

Samech has no true Arabic counterpart because the Arabic sin corresponds to both the Hebrew sin and samech. Considering how the samech–sin redundancy in other Semitic languages predates the Arabic’s language’s evolution, this is understandable. Yiddish also has this phenomenon: in native Yiddish words, only samech is used to represent the S sound, and the sin is only used for words that have their source in semitic languages. Rav Mazuz recently pointed out that in Rashi-era French, not only did the samech and sin sound like an S, but the shin also did, and this is why when Rashi invokes French, the shin is usually used for the S sound. 

Ayin exists also in Arabic, although orthographic variants thereof, specifically the addition of a diacritic dot above, changes the ayin to a ghayn. (I would have expected the aforementioned jim to therefore to be an orthographic variant of this letter instead of the ha.) Many have pointed out that early Greek translations of personal nouns such as ra’am, ‘amora and ‘aza have used the progenitor of the latin G, and this would indicate that Hebrew once had a similar dual use for the ayn symbol, and as Professor Khan has shown me, the jim was once actually the equivalent of a hard G, and still is in some places, so it would be a natural and eventual variant of the ghayn. 

Pei’s equivalent is the fa. It has this weak form, and never a strong form. As I wrote above, modern Israeli Arabic uses a new variant of the ba, but with three lower dots, to represent the P sound. 

The tzadi has the Arabic sad. Further, the sad has a voiced counterpart, ظـ, ẓāʾ, the most recently developed letter in the Arabic language, and the sad and tet are already variants of each other, with the ta being a sad with a vertical line. Strangely, the voiced counterpart of the ta is a sad with an extra dot, ضـ, while the voiced counterpart of the sad, the ẓāʾ, is a ta with a dot. I would have done the opposite. Years ago I wondered why Hebrew did not have these letters. I now realize that they are just too inconvenient, or else we could also expect to see the fricative forms of both the tet and the dad in Arabic. Thus, Arabic developed and maintained letters to represent many of the consonantal sounds that were either lost by spoken dialects of Hebrew, or were never present in Hebrew. Considering that the twenty-two-letter Hebrew alphabet is considered sacrosanct by the Hebrews, and that even the weak sounds from the six beged kefet letters did not earn their own letters, I do not believe we will see new Hebrew letters to represent these sounds any time soon, although the sound of the jim (represented in Modern Hebrew by ג׳) and the modern English CH (represented by צ׳), for instance, are today ubiquitous. I was prompted to think about this by my daughter, who, in second grade, was mindful enough to point out that her version of the Alphabet had both bet and vet, but Ashrei, as printed in her siddur, only had a verse for bet.

Modern Hebrew tutorials for spoken Arabic use the samech to represent the Arabic sad, because the samech is much closer to the way sad should be pronounced than the way the Modern Hebrew tzadi is, although on some street signs, proper nouns with sad’s are rendered with tzadi in Hebrew, e.g. the town of Musmus in the Galilee is מוצמוץ, which delighted my daughter. Also, the ubiquitous condiment hummus, although spelled חומוס in modern Hebrew, should be spelled חֻמֻץ to accurately reflect its Arabic spelling. There are even some families here in Israel that do not eat chickpeas on Passover not because they are legumes but because back in the old country, the word was too similar to חמץ, “leaven.”

Quf: Many people know that the Hebrew quf should be pronounced like the true Arabic quf, what the speech professionals call the voiceless uvular stop, or, to the rest of us, the sound made by pressing the tongue farther back in the mouth, but like the quf in Modern Hebrew, the Arabic quf has also suffered from neglect. In some places it is pronounced like a hard G, while in others it is pronounced like a K, as we do, and sometimes, especially in local dialects, it is not pronounced at all, and is basically treated like an alif. For example, local speakers refer to Jerusalem as al-uds instead of al-quds, and even al-uds often comes out as il-uts, all of the previous with a short vowel sound. Or the imperative of stand up is um instead of qum, and daqiqeh, minutes, becomes da’i’eh. 

Reish: The Arabic sign for reish is the zayn with an additional dot on top, which may indicate the closeness of the two sounds. According to Sefer Yetzira, the reish is produced by the teeth, just like the zayin and samech.  

Shin and sin are one symbol, with the shin having three dots on top. They both even resemble the Assyrian shin: س ش. The extra tails do not appear mid word.

Tau: Both the strong and weak tau have Arabic counterparts, the ta and tha, respectively, with the former with two dots, the latter with three. As we mentioned, the strength of the Hebrew beged kefet letters depends on a letter’s position in a given word, while in Arabic that is not the case. 

More interestingly, the ta has a common silent form, called “ta marbuta,” literally, a “sad ta,” that appears as the feminine suffix roughly equivalent to the qamatz-silent-hei suffix in Hebrew. Interestingly enough, this ta marbuta is silent, like our hei, and is even written as a ha but distinguished by the characteristic two dots on top, just like a ta. That is, orthographically it is a combination of ha and ta. Just like the Hebrew hei suffix becomes an actual tau in various construct states, the ta marbuta becomes an actual ta in construct states. For example, the Arabic word for automobile is sayara, while “his car” is sayarato. When we consider Hebrew, we often think of the silent hei as converting to tau in construct forms, whereas from this point of view, the tau can be considered the default letter, and the hei that exists in isolated forms is the simplified form. This explains, for instance, why we encounter words like zimrath as in עזי וזמרת י-ה and aqereth in מושיבי עקרת הבית are spelled with the tau although they are not in the construct state. (Hat tip: Rabbi Yedidya Naveh of Koren Publishers.)

This is reminiscent of the phenomenon in Hebrew that in certain roots, the final silent hei become a tau in certain conjugations, e.g. ראה is ראתה in the feminine, while in other conjugations it becomes a yod, e.g., as in ראיתי and ראינו. Had an alef been in those roots, it would have stayed in both types of conjugations: the feminine of ברא is ברָאת, and the first persons are בראתי and בראנו.

Concerning the possessive suffixes, in spoken Arabic the male form is as in Hebrew, an O sound, but it is written with a silent ha, reminiscent of uncommon instances where the mater lectionis is also hei for the holam, as in שלמֹה, שילֹה, אהלֹה, and סֻכֹּה. Whereas in Hebrew, the female possessive suffix is usually qamatz-nonsilent (mappiq) hei, and this is mostly overlooked in spoken Hebrew. I know of no one, (not even the usual professionals who otherwise pronounce things properly) who actually tries to pronounce the mappiq hei in conversation. The equivalent suffix in spoken Arabic is much easier to say, as it is written as ha-alif, and is pronounced as “ha.”

The lack of a local Arabic equivalent to the hard G sound made by gimmel has led to some interesting inconsistencies regarding how to spell Ben Gurion, which comes up often considering all the places named after him. Some spell his name with a jim, others with a ghayn, and others with the new, hard-G gim, the aforementioned jim but with three dots instead of one. The first version enjoys the precedent that the Hebrew gimmel has been represented by the Arabic jim, and it is up to the reader to know that historically both were pronounced as G, while the second version enjoys the precedent that foreign words with a hard G have been represented with a ghayn because vocally it is is closest to the hard-G sound. For example, in Arabic a gorilla is called a ghorilla. Indeed, in this case they would be pronouncing “Gurion” with a form of gimmel, just the weak form. I have noticed that, especially around the eponymous airport, all three Arabic spellings of Gurion are commonplace.

Otherwise, many Israeli street signs can be seen as the work of vigilant trolls, who mock the way most Jews pronounce the tzadi, vav, tet, and quf incorrectly. For example, the signs pointing to my town, Kochav Yaakov-Tel Zion, appear as they should in Hebrew, כוכב יעקב – תל ציון, but in Arabic they are rendered as كوخاڤ ياكوڤ تل تسيون, which, represented in Hebrew characters, is כּוכאבֿ יאכּובֿ תל תשיון. That is, although the Biblical name of Jacob has a well-known classical rendering in Arabic, because the Jews pronounce the ayin and quf as alef and kaf respectively, they are rendered as such, and the same with the tzadi of Zion, rendered ts because that is how it is pronounced. Similarly, place names with tet are transliterated with the counterpart of tau, ta, because that is how it is incorrectly pronounced. An example: טירת צבי, Tirat Zvi, is rendered by the Arabic equivalent of תיראת תשבֿי. Lastly, פתח תקוה is (thankfully) transliterated into formal English as Petah Tiqwa, but in Arabic it is   ‎بتاح تكفا, or in Hebrew characters, פּתאח תכּבֿא, although it would have been more egregious had they rendered the first word as פתאך.

The Vowels

The Arabic counterpart of the dagesh hazaq is the shadda, a small W or shin-like symbol written above the letter indicating its gemination. The counterpart of the sh’wa nah (silent sh’wa) indicating that the consonant closes the previous syllable is the sukkun, which appears as a small circle above the letter in question.  

As a general rule, the major vowels are represented with their plene spellings, while the minor vowels are defective, and the ya represents what sound like the Hebrew tzeirei and hiriq, while the waw represents the holam and shuruq sounds. However, there is more ambiguity with regard to the representations of the minor vowels: there is one vowel superscript symbol that represents the short patah sound, and not coincidentally it is called fat-ha, while a single waw-like superscript is used to represent both the equivalents of the qamatz qatan and qubbus, and a single subscript dash represents the equivalents of the short segol and hiriq. Surprisingly, accented, segols in open syllables are transliterated into Arabic also as plene. For example, Petah Tiqwa, above, is sometimes spelled with a yod after the pei equivalent, פיתאח. And, along those lines, many of the counterparts of the qamataz gadol are represented by an additional alןf, as are patahs in open-accented syllables. Thus, names like Ibrahim (Abraham) and Binyamin are written with alif’s after the reish and ya respectively, and in Israel place names with the words sha’ar and har are represented by the Arabic equivalents of האר and שאער. This far more liberal use of the alif to represent the presence of vowels is also characteristic of Yiddish, in which the alef has completely transformed from a mater lectionis into a vowel-letter, although I would be very grateful if someone could enlighten me as to why in Yiddish, our ancestors chose to represent the segol with the ayin. I cannot fathom even a tenuous connection between that particular vowel and the consonant.

Concerning mater lectionis it must be noted that although in many of the languages under discussion they are silent place holders that do not affect the pronunciation, once upon a time they did. It is not due to some arbitrary decision or convenience that the prophets chose to represent the holam and shuruq sounds, for example, with a waw. Rather, it is because the vav and yod once were, and often should still be, a natural, necessary, and logical component of the vowels’ pronunciations, and as I wrote about in my book, the true hiriq and shuruq sounds cannot be articulated without the natural semivowels that complete them, and when they are followed by guttural letters that necessitate the additional patah g’nuva, or the epenthetic in Prof. Khan’s jargon, the semivowel is even geminated. 

Plural suffixes: Instead of im, יםx, in Arabic, as in Aramaic, “in” is often used. In feminine forms, instead of oth, ותx,  ات, which is the equivalent of אתx, is used. However, many nouns have a unique plural form that does not employ a suffix or any set rule of new vowel structure.

…

And now for the nitty-gritty of Prof. Khan’s book. The second volume of Khan’s work is a translation of the Hidāyat al-Qāri, which was written by a prominent grammarian, and it and other Karaite works and documents make up a significant portion of his sources. Although there may be that which we can learn from both Karaite and Samaritan sources, they can hardly be considered by traditional Jews to be sources for anything halacha l’ma’aseh. For example, the notion that the shuruq form of vav hahibbur before labial letters is pronounced as “wu,” and not “u,” is very hard for me to believe, especially because it contradicts most modes of pronunciation among world Jewry, and makes one wonder why such a vav would not therefore be considered a complete syllable unto itself. As I wrote about last time, an analysis of the trop indicates that the Masoretes did not not count the prefix vav as a syllable even when it was pronounced as a shuruq. If they had been pronouncing such a vav as “wu”, it would count as a full syllable, especially if it preceded a letter with a sh’wa. I believe that even the Karaites and Samaritans themselves do not pronounce it that way anymore, if they ever did. R’ Schachter likes to relate a story about a conversation between Rabbi Soloveitchik and Rabbi Saul Lieberman, in which the former was dismissive of certain medieval sources, because just like today when we have pseudo-scholars who write halachic nonsense, they also had such things back then. Just because you can find that Karaites distinguished between the mobile and silent sh’was using different criteria from ours, we should do as they do?!

I would also like an explanation as to why, considering the mountain of proof that the vav was and should be pronounced like a W and not like a V, he recommends that it be pronounced as a V in certain instances. It is inconsistent in theory as well as in practice. However, it is interesting to note that historically Jews in Palestine began to assimilate the vav into a V sound around the same time that speakers of Greek began to assimilate the sound. Although I am happy to let people speak however they may like, I would strongly recommend against this and another common phoneme, namely the Modern Hebrew pronunciation of reish. Both made it into Modern Hebrew via Yiddish, and both make Modern Hebrew sound unpleasantly Germanic. For example, the word aquarium is both pleasant and easy to pronounce, and sounds like a fun place to visit with children, while ak-VA-ghi-um is jarring, hard to pronounce, and sounds sinister. If most can pronounce the vav and reish properly, they should try to do so. For those who may ask, I spell the name of the letter v-a-v in order to distinguish it from the Aarabic waw, although I believe that it makes the W sound. 

Prof. Khan’s take on orthoepy on page 101 fits with my point here that the Sifrei Emet have a higher tendency toward conjunctive cantillation marks than the rest of the books of the Bible. Along similar lines, you will find that in the majority of the biblical books, the non-Emet books, the lower level disjunctives, which therefore also occur earlier in a particular half of a verse, tend to be musical flourishes, and not unsurprisingly, can have many more conjunctive words (i.e., words marked with conjunctive trops) preceding them. For example, silluq and ethnah have at most one conjunctive word connected by either a mercha or munah, respectively, and the second-level disjunctives like tip’ha and zaqef have at most two conjunctives, while the pazer and t’lisha g’dola often have four or five conjunctives, and even up to seven at my last count. (Often, a string of connective words form one adjectival phrase beginning with asher, that or who, even if that phrase itself has many parts of speech.) Jacobson has already pointed out that there are no disjunctives lower than these, and therefore, even at preceding words where we would expect disjunctives, we find conjunctives. There is thus a proportional relationship between musicality and connectivity. 

A recurring argument is that when the Karaite transliterations into Arabic omit mater lectionis, the indication is a short vowel in the original Hebrew. I disagree, because we see that the farther back we go in Biblical Hebrew, fewer and fewer long vowels, especially qamatz and holam, are in the plene form. Incidentally, some have asked me for rules of thumb as to when the holam is plene or deficient. I have two of them: 1. In post-biblical Hebrew, the accented holam of segolate nouns is deficient (e.g., חֹדֶש, עֹשֶק, אֹכֶל, etc.) while in participles, the holam is unaccented and written in the plene form (e.g., אוֹכל, עוֹשֶק, etc.). In Biblical Hebrew, the older the book, the less likely these participles are to have the vav. 2. In the Torah and the earlier biblical books, the holam is often deficient when it is part of a plural suffix. Those words in which it is written plene, e.g., in בנות, are the exceptions. However, when the vav is part of the root, it usually is written, for example when the root of the word is yod-reish-(silent) hei and the conjugation is in the hif’il, which is why the word תורה and its variants are written in the plene form. 

Pg. 113. I used to joke that the common Ashkenazi practice of distinguishing between qamatz and patah and tzeirei-segol was an enactment of the biennial convention of Ashkenazic Jewry, for if you were to claim that qamatz and patah used to sound the same, and tzeirei-segol sounded the same, why do Ashkenazim distinguish between? However, Prof. Khan seems to say that it was apparently the case, and we are left looking for an explanation as to how our ancestors figured out the difference in theory and adopted it in practice. 

The argument on page 409 regarding epenthetic vowels fits with the argument I made previously about the pronunciation of ohela.

Pg. 428: Yaamdu. I believe that Prof. Khan and I are making similar proposals, except that he is using much more advanced terminology. 

Pg. 450: As per the brilliant and indispensable treatise on cantillation found in the classic Tiqqun Mishor, I believe that it is much easier to explain the vocalization of the word מה (ma) with the rules governing the hei hay’dia, the definite article. The atei merahiq (dehiq) explanation may account for the dagesh in the first letter of the second word, but it does not account for the variety of possible vowels: segol, qamatz, patah, etc. that parallels that of the hei hayedia and that can be explained using the general principles of vowel shifts. 

Pg. 509. Is the masoretic hyphen supposed to be called a מַקֵּף or מַקָּף? I can entertain either, just like the exact vowelization (and names for that matter) of the words we use for the vowels are also pretty dynamic, and the same can be said of the trop. 

Pg. 519: Prof. Khan does not find any lengthening of the vowel in the syllable marked by the metiga of the zaqef gadol, nor of the geresh of the ravia mugrash. As I wrote earlier, I am of the belief that these particular symbols are quite arbitrary, and their placement is less about accentage, etc., and more about distinguishing them from similar symbols, and explains why trop like the dehi and t’lisha gedola are always marked on the first syllables even if those syllables are not accented. 

Pg. 524: Concerning the verb להניח, Prof. Khan offers that the forms which have the dagesh are not reflective of a different root altogether, but rather are a convention to create a distinctive meaning. The forms with the weak nun imply “to give rest,” while the forms with the strong nun imply placement. It would thus seem logical that the blessing on laying t’fillin should be להַנּיח תפלין and not להָניח תפלין. However, most siddurim follow the Shulhan Aruch’s ruling (Orah Hayim 25:7) to use the latter formulation, and indeed, the Mishna B’rura there explains that the weaker form implies placement, while it is the strong form that implies handing over. However, in the original source in the Beth Yosef, it is mentioned that there is no actual difference in meaning between the two forms, but the weak form is preferred because it is the one used in the verse (Ezekiel 44:30), להָניח ברכה, “to place a blessing within your house.” The Vilna Gaon seems to endorse this view. 

The following is from a letter I wrote to the publishers of the Makbili edition of the Mishneh Torah:

במהדורתכם, בהלכות תפילין, פרק ד׳, כל פעם שמדובר על מעשה הנחת תפילין וברכתה, הנו״ן דגושה והתנועה לפניה או חיריק חסר או פתח, ושתיהן תנועות קלות, וזה למרות דעת השולחן ערוך וכמה אחחרונים שצ״ל נו״ן רפה והתנועה לפניה או קמץ או צירה, ושתיהן תנועות גדולות. לדעת מרן הבית יוסף, זה בגלל שהנחת תפילין שורשו נו״ח, ומעשה ההנחה הוא בבנין הפעיל, לעומת הנחה בנו״ן דגושה, שהיא באה משורש אחר ומשמעותה לשון עזיבה

?האם דעתו של הרמב״ם מפורשת שכן צריכים להגות ״הנחה״, או האם יש לכם סיבה אחרת בשיטת הניקוד

In short, they decided to vowelize l’haniah t’fillin, the blessing on laying t’fillin, with a dagesh in the nun, l’hanniah t’fillin. This is in contrast to most known opinions, including that of the Shulhan Aruch. Whose opinion were they following, bearing in mind that Maimonides himself did not actually state anything in regards to the matter and his own editions of the Mishneh Torah were not vowelized?

The editor answered that

:זוהי תמצית תשובת ד”ר יחיאל קארה, עורך המשנה של המהדורה לענייני ניקוד

במהדורתנו ניקדנו על פי המסורת התימנית, וכן הוא גם בכ”י קאופמן של המשנה. אכן במקרא אפשר שיש מקום להבחין בין “והניח לכם מכל אויביכם” ב-נ’ פשוטה לעומת “והניחם שם” ב-נ’ דגושה, כהבדלה בין נתינת מנוחה לבין שימה, אך הדבר אינו מוחלט, ובכל מקרה מדובר במה שמכונה “פועל עלול”, שבו יש תנועה בין הגזרות השונות. וראה גם במילון אבן שושן, שמביא את שתי הצורות בלא להבחין ביניהן

Or in short, that there is a Yemenite tradition that it should be that way. Indeed, one Yemenite rabbi showed me some Yemenite codes that explicitly record the practice.

A few years ago, I found what may be the source for the Yemenite/Maimonidean tradition.  According to the Shulhan Aruch, the three-letter root of l’haniah is nun–yod (or waw)-heth. Thus, all the letters of the root are present in that conjugation, and thus do not require any letter to be geminated in order to compensate. However, In The Guide for the Perplexed, 1:67, Maimonides wrote (Friedlander translation):

Our Sages, and some of the Commentators, took, however, nuaḥ in its primary sense “to rest,” but as a transitive form (hif’il), explaining the phrase thus: “and he gave rest to the world on the seventh day,” i.e., no further act of creation took place on that day.

It is possible that the word wayyanaḥ is derived either from yanaḥ, a verb of the class pe-yod, or naḥah, a verb of the class lamed-he, and has this meaning: “he established” or “he governed” the Universe in accordance with the properties it possessed on the seventh day”; that is to say, while on each of the six days events took place contrary to the natural laws now in operation throughout the Universe, on the seventh day the Universe was merely upheld and left in the condition in which it continues to exist. Our explanation is not impaired by the fact that the form of the word deviates from the rules of verbs of these two classes: for there are frequent exceptions to the rules of conjugations, and especially of the weak verbs: and any interpretation which removes such a source of error must not be abandoned because of certain grammatical rules. We know that we are ignorant of the sacred language, and that grammatical rules only apply to the majority of cases.

Thus, it seems that in the form l’hanniah, the yod of the beginning of the shoresh has been left out, necessitating the dagesh in the second letter of the root, the nun. However, Maimonides acknowledges the apparent difficulty: usually, when the first letter of a root is yod, verbs in the hiph’il conjugation are vowelized with a full holam after the prefix, for example להוציא from יצא and להושיב from ישב, and even להוליך from הלך, which does not even have a yod. 

Pg. 599-600: The discussion reminds me of my epiphany concerning the Vilna Gaon’s pronunciation of זֵכר. The difficulty native speakers have when trying to distinguish between sets of similar sounds is very frustrating, especially when they attempt to add their own vowelizations. I tell Israeli schoolteachers that it is not even worth it for them to try, because when it comes to qamatz-patah and segol-tzeirei, they will always get it wrong. 

Finally, Prof. Khan is not alone in advocating that the sh’wa na’ of Tiberian Hebrew be pronounced basically like a hataf patah. Support for this position comes from written testimony that describes it as such. However, I do not accept this. It seems to me today, linguists discuss dozens of types of vowels, and spoken English, for example, utilizes dozens of vowel sounds, but in the medieval period, they used to only discuss three, and then five, different vowel qualities. It makes sense that to them, the sh’wa would have to fit into one of those descriptive categories even if we now have the tools to be more specific. Further, if the sh’wa was supposed to sound like a hataf patah in the majority of cases, why did the Msaoretes choose the sign of the sh’wa, which half the time is used to mark a letter that closes a syllable, and not the hataf patah, which they had already created to mark specific sh’wa’s? Also, it would be a practice that contradicts the living custom of most of Jewry, and would require a thoroughly novel explanation as to why the pronunciation of the vav hahibbbur changes before words that begin with a letter vowelized with sh’wa. However, I also believe that a sh’wa should not be pronounced identically to the short I sound as is common in most places today. The best description of the sound that I can offer today is the sound in the word “the,” as in “I went to the store.”

…

Concerning Vav Hahippuch

As opposed to the conjunctive vav, the vav hahippuch generally turns a past-tense verb into future tense, and a future-tense verb into past tense. Many thus believe that the hippuch, inversing, refers to the tense. But, the vav hahippuch inverses a lot more:

The accentage: In most past-tense verbs converted to future, the accent is shifted from the middle syllable, if that is its position, to the last syllable. E.g. a-HAV-ta is “you loved,” whereas w’A-hav-Ta is “you shall love”. (Most speakers of Hebrew are unaware that the past-tense second person plural verbs are accented on the last syllable: אהבתם is ahav-TEM, and not aHAV-tem, and when marked with the vav hahippuch stay accented as such.) Notable exceptions occur in verbs with yod/silent hei as the last letter of the root. E.g., w’a-SI-tha, “you shall make,” is accented on its middle syllable even though it is future tense. Once again it is verbs of this category that are the major exception; last time I pointed out that the singular masculine past-tense conjugations of these verbs do not follow the rule of athei merahiq. In the case of a future-tense verb made past, the accent is shifted from the last syllable to an earlier one. (e.g., ya-QUM becomes way-YA-qom, and yo-MAR becomes way-YO-mer).  

The syntax: Standard form would be subject-verb-object. When vav-hahippuch is utilized, the order is verb-subject-etc.. This is the usual form used throughout the Bible when describing events, and usually in chronological order. When I teach about vav hahipppuch, this is the first indication: Does the verb start the sentence or clause instead of the subject? If yes, then you most likely have vav hahippuch.

Lastly, the vocalization is changed, at least from future to past. Instead of simply being marked with a sh’wa, or whatever would have taken the sh’wa’s place based under other considerations (e.g., becoming a shuruq before labial letters), the vav hahippuch is vowelized with either a patah before the future-prefix tau, yod, or nun, or a qamatz before the future prefix alef, which cannot receive a dagesh. Thus, when you have a vav hahippuch before a first-person singular pi’el verb like avaqqesh, which starts with an alef vocalized with a hataf patah, the vav hahippuch will be marked with a qamatz. There are two practical applications with regard to the meaning: If the vav preceding such a verb was not a vav hahippuch, it would be marked with an ordinary patah and the verb is in standard future-tense form, and therefore the reader must distinguish between the two. If he does not, he should be corrected, and normally, the vocalization of the vav hahippuch actually matters.  However, the vocalization of the vav hahibbur, which can prefix all parts of speech, is not critical, i.e., whether one pronounces it with a sh’wa, or any vowel, or as a shuruq, does not affect the meaning and intent. Because vav hahippuch only prefixes verbs, any time a vav prefixes anything but a verb, I would not correct the reader if he pronounces it with the wrong vowel. For example, if one were to read וגדולה as vig-do-LA  instead of ug-do-LA, or ושמעון as wa-shim-’ON instead of w’shim-’ON.

As far as I can tell, classical Aramaic has no vav hahippuch, and perhaps others can weigh in on whether such a form exists in other semitic languages.  

Once one is familiar with the style of the vav hahippuch, he will notice that certain verses (or parts of verses) actually follow standard syntax: The subject will precede the verb, which will be in the correct tense. In such cases, the subject may be preceded by a vav hahibbur, and the overall indication will be that the information expressed is that which had happened previously. I.e., such a style of syntax indicates the past perfect. Some examples:

Genesis 4:1: והאדם ידע את חוה אשתו, “The man had known his wife, Eve.” Many scholars have pointed out that this indicates that Eve had at least conceived her first children before Adam ate of the forbidden fruit, with the Midrash even describing Cain’s birth the day Adam and Eve were created.

Genesis 14:1: עָשׂוּ מִלְחָמָה אֶת-בֶּרַע מֶלֶךְ סְדֹם, “They had made war against Bera, King of Sodom, etc.” As is evident from the subsequent verses, the initial war preceded the events of the running narrative by some fourteen years.

Genesis 18:17: וַה׳ אָמָר הַמְכַסֶּה אֲנִי מֵאַבְרָהָם אֲשֶׁר אֲנִי עֹשֶׂה “And the Lord had said, would I conceal from Abraham that which I am doing?” That is, God had already decided, so to speak, that He would inform Abraham of the judgment against Sodom and Gomorrah. 

If you read II Samuel 2, it seems that Abner crowned Ishbosheth in the aftermath of Saul’s death, shortly before or right around the time David was crowned king of Judah, and considering that the verse describes how Ishbosheth’s kingdom gradually expanded as more tribes accepted him, it seems to me that it took David five and a half years after Ishbosheth’s death to then be accepted as king over all of Israel, and in support of the Ttosafists’ classical position against that of  Rashi’s (Sanhedrin 20a) , it took some time before Ishboshesh was accepted  by all of the tribes, but the five years of no kingdom seem to have been after his death, as the tribes came around to accepting David as king.