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

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

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.)

The glottal stop of the ayin sometimes gets changed to a g when the Hebrew is transliterated. What the newspapers call the Gaza Strip is known in Hebrew as 'azzah (where the apostrophe there marks the glottal stop).

[sethg]

I think this happened when the Hebrew got translated to Greek.

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Yes. It's more than sometimes, I believe -- the glottal stop was originally the universal pronunciation, and differentiating between an aleph and an ayin was critical in classical Hebrew. That's why nineteenth-century Jewish scholar types referred to the Shema as the "Shemang," which is a weird thing to see if you don't know what they're talking about...

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Yes, the Greek transcribed the glottal ayin pronunciation current among Jews at the time of the the translation (see above).

[cellio]

Interesting! Are you saying that the "g" is notational but not meant to be pronounced, like the "th" that distinguishes a taf from a tet? And then, as with "th", people started pronouncing from transliteration a sound that did not occur in the original?

[sethg]

I have heard that the classical Hebrew gimel was a kind of gurgly sound in the back of the throat, like the modern Israeli Hebrew resh, so transliterating ayin as "g" might have been more reasonable once upon a time.

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

It's a historical fragment, basically, of the way Hebrew evolved. The Greek translators wrote "Gomorrah" because they heard that "ng" glottal sound as a "g". But later, over time, Western Hebrew speakers (but not some Sephardim) made the ayin into a silent consonant. (I can make the original sound but it's no use if you're not here to hear it! Try catching the glottis in the back of your throat.)

When you mean "people started pronouncing," you mean in the vernacular, and the answer is yes. Non-Jews and Jews in the diaspora worked from the Greek. Similarly non-Jews in the vernacular say "Jerusalem," "Joseph" etc. even though we know that there's no J in Hebrew; it's just that the first printed Bibles came from Germany, where J is pronounced as "y". Very similar process.

Tet and taf are a different case, actually. I don't know the differentiation between those two letters, but the use of "th" and "t" is actually within taf itself -- depending on the dot inside (I'm drawing a blank on what that's called). The taf was pronounced "th" unless with was doubled (presence of the dot), which came to be "t." Then among Ashkenazim the "th" became "s", and among Sephardim, it went back to "t."

There's a similar thing with some of the other dotted letters -- dalet was pronounced "dh" without a dot and "d" with the dot -- though I don't know that that was preserved in the Septuagint, as th/t was. I don't remember the other dotted letters but it was similar for them -- the aspiration coming to soften the letter. And don't even get me started on vav/waw.

See all the useless things a barely-passed semester taking Hebrew at the Oriental Institute can teach you? It also works well to pick up chicks at parties. ;-)

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Ah yes -- I believe the hard g was only when it was doubled (dotted). But Jews in ancient times really did say their ayins as "ng". See the Jewish Encyclopedia for more.

Basically classical Hebrew sounded a lot like we hear Arabic today, with gutterals and aspirated consonants.

[magid.livejournal.com]

I can make the original sound but it's no use if you're not here to hear it!

Time for a phone post!

the dot inside

dagesh?

[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]

I'm too cheap to pay for phone posts... I know I should...

Dagesh is right, I think.

[cellio]

Time for a phone post!

Ooh, yes! Though from his description I can make a sound that I surmise might be what he's describing. It requires a lot of concentration, though, just as making clicks in languages that use them does.

[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. :-)

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

Yes, and the reason for this is that there was no sound like it in Greek. The Greeks "heard" it as a G sound because that was as close as they could get with their set of phonemes.

Incidentally, gamma has become a guttural sound in modern Greek, I believe due to the influence of Turkish. It's no longer a velar G but a guttural G, like the letter ghayn in Arabic.