חוק אוי"ה ובגדכפ"ת / בגדכפ"ת and אוי"ה The Law of
In the Tiberian vocalization of the Bible, as is well known, there are many exceptions to the basic rule that the letters בגדכפ"ת "are soft (that is, without dageš lene) in initial position (realized as fricatives) when preceded by the vowel-letters.אוי"ה The first Hebrew grammarians...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | Hebrew |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
HUC
1985
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| In: |
Hebrew Union College annual
Year: 1984, Volume: 55, Pages: 1-14 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Parallel Edition: | Non-electronic
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| Summary: | In the Tiberian vocalization of the Bible, as is well known, there are many exceptions to the basic rule that the letters בגדכפ"ת "are soft (that is, without dageš lene) in initial position (realized as fricatives) when preceded by the vowel-letters.אוי"ה The first Hebrew grammarians already attempted to collect, categorize and formulate general rules for these exceptions. The most comprehensive and detailed formulation, which suggests rules for the cancellation of the fricative realizations of initial בגדכפ"ת in the over-whelming majority of the exceptional cases, is found in the important grammatical composition Hidāyat al-Qāri (= The Instruction of the Reader), written in Judeo-Arabic in the first half of the eleventh century by an anonymous Palestinian scholar. Most of this book, which its author prepareed in an abridged (al-muḫtaṣar) as well as a full-length version, has not yet been published in print. Alongside the masoretic formulation of the basic rule for initial soft,בגדכפ"ת which takes into account the biblical spelling only (i.e. the word whose first letter is one of בגדכפ"ת, is preceded by a word ending with one of אוי"ה letters), the author of Hidāyat al-Qāri juxtaposes a more progressive formula, which takes into account the pronunciation and not just the written form, and which is based on phonological criteria (the structure of the syllable). In the course of his discussion, the author of Hidāyat al-Qāri, for the first time in the history of medieval Hebrew linguistics, provides comment on and interesting explanations for two phenomena unique to biblical language, "deḥiq" and "ʾate-meraḥiq". Especially interesting is also the author's treatment of a few examples known to have been disputed by Ben-Asher and BenNaftali. The present article describes and analyzes the rules of אוי"ה and בגדכפ"ת as they appear in Hidāyat al-Qāri, and compares them with the formulations of Aaron Ben-Asher (in Sefer Diqduqe Hateʿamim, Baer and Strack edition) and of Rav Saadya Gaon (in his commentary on Sefer Yeṣira and in his grammar, Kutub al-Luga). Several passages from Hidāyat al-Qāri (mainly taken from the full-length version in MS. Leningrad, Second Firkovich Collection No. 2490), appear in this article in the original Judeo-Arabic with Hebrew translation. |
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| Contains: | Enthalten in: Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Hebrew Union College annual
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