parsha bit: Vayeira

[cellio]

S'dom and 'Amorah were destroyed because of their great evil. Rabbi Yehudah said that the leaders of S'dom made a proclamation that anyone who so much as gave a loaf of bread to a poor man would be put to death. He further says that Lot had a daughter who fed a poor man and was punished in this way.

(Source: Pirke d'Rabbi Eliezer)

Aside: can anyone reading this tell me how the translators got from 'Amorah (ayin, patach) to "Gomorah"? There's no gimel there. (The vowel change is less surprising, as random vowel changes in translation/transliteration aren't uncommon. But adding a consonant is novel.)

Comments

[cellio]

Thanks for this!

depending on the dot inside (I'm drawing a blank on what that's called)

Dageish. Historically there are six letters that change pronunciation when there's a dageish -- beged kefet is the mneumonic. Today we only change three -- bet, chaf, and pei. I had forgotten that two of the others were gimel and taf.

(Interesting aside: we name the letters after the dageish forms. Everyone knows that the second letter of the alef-bet is, well, bet -- which is only pronounced that way with the addition of the dageish. You would think that we'd call that letter vet by default -- and similarly for kaf and fei.)

And don't even get me started on vav/waw.

I had always assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that this was purely a notational issue. Long before computer typesetting some academic said "we need an unambiguous mapping from the transliteration back to the Hebrew and 'v' is already taken for 'vet', so let's use 'w" which doesn't appear in the language at all". Sort of like how we get "q" for kuf. Is my impression wrong? (Err, if this counts as "getting you started", I apologize.)

By the way, there's a mark that looks like a dageish but isn't; it's a mapik, and it sometimes appears in terminal hei. (You know it's not a dageish because hei can't take a dageish.) I was taught this summer that it is aspirated when pronounced. I don't know how many people actually do that; it's hard to hear. But so says one rabbinic student at HUC, anyway.

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

OK, get me started... :-). Actually it's not a long story: the vav was originally pronounced "w." It still is among the Yemenites. How and when it elided into v, I do not know, but I believe the ambivalence about it goes back to the Phoenecians, since their version is an antecedent to both V and W in modern English orthography. If you look in the Hebrew Encyclopedia (which is very pokey today) they always use waw for vav.

I know about that mapik but didn't remember what it was called. Yeah, it's in the siddur -- magbiah shefalim -- just before mi kamocha.

[cellio]

I know about that mapik but didn't remember what it was called. Yeah, it's in the siddur -- magbiah shefalim -- just before mi kamocha.

And "eitz chayim bah", and "y'hei shemei rabah", and every occurrence of "halleluyah". Once I learned this tidbit I stated noticing them. :-)