Chris Jacobs wrote at 12:54 AM on Wednesday, March 5, 2003: >But why do you call the kholam a "high left dot"? > >As far as I know it can appear high left or middle, to indicate that is >should be pronounced after the consonant, or right, to pronounce it before. >So the meaning of a shin with two dots above it is ambiguous,
In classical Hebrew KHOLEM always represents a trailing vowel, i.e. it is always pronounced after the consonant over which it is written. [In fact I can't think of ANY vowel sign in classical Hebrew which represents a pronunciation that precedes the consonant to which it is associated, ignoring, for obvious reasons, written/read (kethib/qere) orthographies, where the vowels indicate what is to be read in spite of the consonants that are written.] And so the graphemic sequence SHIN KHOLEM is never ambiguous in classical Hebrew. (I don't know about modern Israeli Hebrew.) About the only "unusual" orthographic phenomenon I can think of related to KHOLEM is that when it occurs after SIN it "shares the same dot" with SIN. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Scholarly Technology Specialist Center For Scholarly Resources, Sheridan Libraries Garrett Room, MSE Library, 3400 N. Charles St. The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 mobile: 410 245-7168 fax: 410-516-6229 Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project: www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi Manager, Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding: www.jhu.edu/ice
