Abstract

Geoffrey Khan looks at imperfect performances of the prestigious Tiberian pronunciation tradition that are reflected in medieval Bible manuscripts. He proposes explanatory models for the development of such imperfect performances. Three factors are identified: interference of a less prestigious substrate, which he identifies as the Hebrew component of Jewish vernacular Arabic; hypercorrections; and varying degrees of acquisition of the Tiberian tradition. Khan describes these various phenomena and concludes that the imperfect performances must be datable to a period when the Tiberian pronunciation tradition was still alive and was familiar, though not perfectly, to the scribes.

Highlights

  • We survey two sources of inscriptional evidence—Neo-Punic inscriptions from North Africa and Latin and Neo-Punic inscriptions from Sardinia—exploring the implications for better understanding the structure of the Neo-Punic vowel system, that of Latin in© R

  • When attempting to draw solid conclusions from the evidence of the transcriptions, it must always be kept in mind that ancient Israel has been home to many different Hebrew dialects and reading traditions throughout the centuries

  • We have suggested that the introduction of gemination into this form was a product of the reading tradition rather than the living language; it should be compared to the phenomenon of dagesh mavḥin attested in both Tiberian and Babylonian Hebrew

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Summary

Introduction

We survey two sources of inscriptional evidence—Neo-Punic inscriptions from North Africa and Latin and Neo-Punic inscriptions from Sardinia—exploring the implications for better understanding the structure of the Neo-Punic vowel system, that of Latin in© R. The early masoretic treatises discuss many different phonetic contexts in which an isolated, word-internal shewa not under a geminated consonant is pronounced as vocal, in contrast to the general rule These include the shewa under the ‫ מ‬of the word-initial cluster -‫ ַה ְְמ‬(under certain conditions); a shewa under the first of a pair of identical consonants (always when preceded by a long vowel, and often when preceded by a short vowel); the shewa in certain forms of the verbs ‫,בְ ְַרְך/ ִה ְת ָּברְך‬ ‫ ;גְ ְרׁש , ְָּא ְַכל , ָּיְ ְַרד , ְָּה ַלְְך‬the shewa beneath a sibilant following conjunctive waw (under certain conditions); various other smaller classes of phonetic contexts (Yeivin 1968, 22–49).

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