Re: 5 Hebrew Consonances Shaping

From: Arno Schmitt (arno@zedat.fu-berlin.de)
Date: Thu Jun 03 1999 - 08:30:42 EDT


Dear Mr Cowan,

since Mr. Rosenne never answers my questions, never gives an
argument (other than "this has been discussed") and contradicts
himself all the time, I take the liberty to put your argument into
perspective.

You wrote:

> The trouble is that there's evidence that the Hebrew final forms
> aren't used merely contextually. Robert Hetzron's article on
> Hebrew in _The World's Major Languages_ (Comrie, ed.; ISBN
> 0-19-630632-9 hbk, 0-19-506511-5 pbk) states that non-final
> PEH is often used to indicate final [p] in non-native words, as
> final PEH normally denotes [f].
  
1.) If this is true for feh/peh, why should the other four final
shape have separate codepoints?
2.) There are two inaccuracies in "final PEH normally denotes [f]"
    a) not normally, but always
    b) therefore it makes no sense to talk of "final PEH", it
should be "final FEH"
3.) In PEH/FEH and CAF/CHAF two phenomena get mixed up:
dagesh and final shape.
a) The dagesh turns feh and chaf into peh and caf respectively.
b) No letter takes a dagesh, when it stands at the end of a
syllable.
a+-b) there are no final peh and caf



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