Note: the Hebrew looks correct to me when read in the Blog, but the file exported to email turns all the Hebrew into question marks and other punctuation signs. Not sure what I can do about that.

This topic is one of the more frequently recurring in my Hebrew teaching, the question of the proper pronunciation of the vowel sign qametz: -ָ Speakers using the traditional Ashkenazi pronunciation pronounce every qametz like the “aw” in “awful.” The modern Israeli pronunciation is more complex. In most cases, it it is pronounced “a” as in “father.” But about ten percent of the time, Israelis pronounce it “o” as in “hole.”

In Modern (Israeli) Hebrew there is a rule for choosing the pronunciation: a qametz in a closed, unaccented syllable is pronounced “o,” while all others are pronounced “a.” The most common example, very well observed among Hebrew speakers, is the word כָּל pronounced like “coal” in English. One reason the pronunciation is obvious is that כָּל is the construct form of the noun כֹּל which means “all” or “everything.” The construct form כָּל really means “all of” or “each of” and is extremely common in all phases of Hebrew.

Here’s an example of a word many modern speakers mispronounce because the form is more less common, I’ve taken it from the Amidah prayer: וְטַהֵר לִבֵּנוּ לְעָבְדְּךָ בֶּאֱמֶת The full line is pronounced, vetaher libenu leOvdekha be’emet. I’ve capitalized the O to emphasize that pronunciation in the word. How does the rule work in this word? The accent is on the last syllable: leOvdeKHA. That means the qametz is in unaccented syllable. But is it closed or open? As the Masoretes drew the vowel signs, they clearly indicate that this is a closed syllable because they not only have two sh’vas in a row (more on that some other time), but they put a dagesh (a dot, if you will) in the dalet which shows that it opens a new syllable. So we have the terms of the rule: the qametz is contained within a closed, unaccented syllable.

This pronunciation is further confirmed by the fact that this is a short form of the infinitive of the verb, la-avOd, which in its longer form would be spelled with a vav like this: וֹ. The meaning of the lins is, “And purify our hearts to truly worship you.” And the infinitive “to worship” is la-avOd. All signs therefore point to a pronunciation of O as in hole.

As I mentioned at the outset, Ashkenazi speakers need not worry about this since they pronounce all qametz vowels the same. Another group of Jews also had no need to be concerned, the Masoretes who actually invented the sign. These Masoretes had only one sign because they pronounced them all the same. We can’t be certain whether that was aw like Ashkenazis or something closer to the “o” in “hole.” But the obvious fact that they had just one sign shows that a) they pronounced them all the same and b) they pronounced them differently from the patah which is universally agreed to be like the “a” of “father.”

To be a little more precise, we are speaking here of a group better termed the Tiberian Masoretes. As it turns out, there at least three different communities of Masoretes, and they probably did not agree about the pronunciation of Hebrew. It is an interesting fact of history that the vowel system invented by the Tiberian Masoretes is the one that survived–chosen by all Modern Jews, even though none actually preserves the pronunciations favored by that group!

The other two groups are usually referred to as Babylonian and Palestinian. We have a significant collection of the manuscripts written by Babylonian Masoretes–the most distinctive feature is that they wrote all the vowel signs above the letters. The evidence for the Palestinian group is the sparsest. There is, of course, no way to know if there were even more groups of Jews working to preserve the pronunciation of biblical Hebrew, but these are the three systems for which evidence survives.

It is likely that the dual pronunciation of the qametz was a feature of the dialect of one of the non-Tiberian groups, and this pronunciation was retained by the non-Ashkenazi Jewish populations of Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews (technically termed “Eidot HaMizrah”).

While the Tiberian Masoretes did not distinguish more than one kind of qametz, they did clearly understand that the sign sh’va ( -ְ ) which they invented could be used two different ways. Note that this word has entered English parlance as shwa which perhaps oddly enough is a more accurate pronunciation of the word. In the early medieval era, Jews transformed the consonant ו from its original pronunciation as a “w” into “v.”

The shva or shwa is a brief hesitation in the pronunciation of a word. It is heard either as a very short vowel, or falls to quiescence–meaning it is then not heard at all, except as a pause.

The shva is the result of the slurring of an original full vowel, and the Masoretes realized something very important about such slurring. When a vowel is slurred, that slurring sound is the same no matter which vowel is being slurred. That’s why they represented every slurred vowel with the same sign. In English, by contrast, even when we slur a vowel, typically we retain that vowel in our spelling. Think, for example, of the word “business” which could have benefited from two shvas: b’z’ness. Although perhaps there are some who prefer to say, “boozeeness.”

The Tiberian Masoretes employed the shva either for such a slurred vowel, or also in the case where there was no vowel at all. They were focused on making the pronunciation of every word of the Bible as clear as possible, so they were loathe to leave a blank space in the middle of the word. The first of shva they termed the shva na’ ( שְּוָא נַע), the second they deemed the ( שְּוָא נַח). The word נַחmeans “movement” and the term is sometimes rendered into English as “mobile shva.” What this means is that in this case the shva is a vowel, because vowels are what allow us to move from one consonant to another. The word נַח means “quiet” and the term then is usually translated “silent” or “quiescent” shva.

Israeli Hebrew has muddled the matter even more. While biblical Hebrew has only the two types of shva, modern speakers often allow the shva that is supposed to be pronounced to quiesce, in effect changing it from mobile to silent. Israeli grammarians sometimes list this as a third type of shva which they deem שְּוא מְרַחֶפֶת shva m’rahefet which translates to “fluttering” or “hovering” shva.

You may be wondering by this point why I have dredged up all this obscurity in the context of a discussion of whether to pronounce the qametz as “a” as in “father” or “o” as in “hole.” The reason is found in the rule I quoted. In Israeli Hebrew (and the older dialects on which it is based), a qametz is pronounced “o” as in “hole” when it is found in a closed, unaccented syllable. It is easy to know whether a syllable of a biblical Hebrew word is accented or not because those same Tiberian Masoretes who gave us the qametz and the shva also placed an accent mark in the accented syllable of almost every word in the Bible. But how do we know whether the syllable is closed or open? That often depends on a shva. If the syllable is terminated by a silent shva, then it is a closed syllable. But if it is a mobile shva, then the qametz will be pronounced “a” as in “father.”

And if it is a shva m’rahefet? Your guess is as good as mine.

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t