minor liturgical oddities

[cellio]

During Pesach I've finally noticed two things I'm a little curious about.

First, there are many brachot that we say before performing mitzvot. They all follow a formula: "blessed...who commanded [*] us...". What's odd is that the final few words are sometimes verbs ("to kindle lights") and sometimes nouns ("about counting the omer"). Why the difference? Why l'hadlik but al s'firat? If most of the bracha is standardized, why didn't the rabbis standardize on one more piece, either "to" (infinitive verb) or "about" (al noun-phrase)?

[*] Or "commands us"? Is that a reversing vav? I've seen both translations.

Second, a few paragraphs after we say the sh'ma we say mi chamocha. That phrase appears twice but is slightly altered the second time: mi chamocha ba'elim..., mi kamocha nedar.... Back when I didn't really know anything about Hebrew grammar I just surrounded this question with a "weird grammar stuff" field. But now I know that they are both the same phrase: "who is like". So why does the first have a dageish (changing kaf to chaf) and the other not? What I noticed recently is that in one of the two, the words are joined by a "hyphen" (I'm not sure if that's what Hebrew calls that mark). Presumably they're like that in the siddur because they're like that in the torah. If one were chanting this from torah trope, the joined words would be treated as one -- one trope symbol rather than two, and you'd run 'em togther a little. Chaf is one of the "beged kefet" letters, letters that get or drop a dageish depending on where they are in the word (or, more precisely, the kinds of syllables that preceed and follow them in the word). I'm a little fuzzy on the rule, but I suspect that "michamocha" and "mi kamocha" trigger this rule differently. It all makes me wonder why the torah (well, the Masorites who added vowels and punctuation to the torah) did it this way in this case -- is there some deeper meaning that argues against consistency?

Comments

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

I had a Hebrew teacher in college who claimed that the mi kamocha vs mi chamocha was a mistake and that both should have been "k". At the time I thought she was wrong/ill-informed (since I'd noticed that sometimes the beged kefet letters spirantize at the beginnings of words and sometimes they don't), but the comment helped inspire a class project for a linguistics class I took later and then my masters thesis even later.

Short answer: it has to do with the various levels of phrase divisions within a pasuk and how they interact with things like noun phrases and prepositional phrases. Since the mi chamocha and mi kamocha phrases don't have exactly the same grammatical structure, the within-phrase breaks aren't in exactly the same places in the two of them, so spirantization is/n't allowed between the first and second words.

If you look at the t'amim, the beged kefet letters will spirantize across certain pairs but not others - not because the because the letters are following the t'amim but because both are a recording of the readers' rhythm. The same way we push certain pieces of an English sentence together and put longer pauses between them, Biblical Hebrew speakers allowed merging between words (i.e. spirantization) in some cases but not others.

[cellio]

Thanks for the explanation!

And I learned a new word, too. :-)