Chris Jacobs wrote at 7:27 PM on Wednesday, March 5, 2003: >> 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 it >> >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.) > >"When holem precedes ?, the point is placed on the >upper right of the letter, as with ?????? (yo¯'ma<caron>r). >When it follows the ?, the point is placed on the >upper left, as in ????? ('o¯bhe¯dh). When holem precedes >??, the points coincide, as with ?????? (mo¯s<caron>e<caron>l). >When holem follows ??, the points again coincide as >with ?????? (so¯t?e¯n). The letter ??? will be "s<caron>o¯" to >commence a syllabe, e.g., ?????? (s<caron>o¯ma<caron>'), and "o¯s" in >other places." > >[ R.K. Harrison, Teach Yourself Biblical Hebrew ]
The case of (written) Yo'MaR is not an exception. The pronunciation is "yomar", the aleph not being pronounced; and therefore the KHOLEM is written after the consonant which directly precedes it in pronunciation. In the examples 'oBeD, MoSHeL, and SoTeN the KHOLEM, as expected, follows in pronunciation the letter with which it is associated. I can't make out the transcription "The letter ??? will be "s<caron>o¯" to commence a syllabe, e.g., ?????? (s<caron>o¯ma<caron>'), and "o¯s" in other places." and I don't have Harrison's grammar at work to check the reading; but it sounds like an explanation of how SHIN + KHOLEM are written, which has already been discussed. >In the Bagster Polyglot Bible, Hebrew-English Old Testament, translation >Everard van der Hooght, >Genesis 1.3 "weyyomer elohiem" "And God said" >the holem is clearly above the aleph, not above the yod. Same response given for YoMaR above. >I see in fact _another_ example of a holem to the right, which Harrison >did not mention: >the holem in "elohiem" is above the he, not above the lamed. Due to innate complexity there is variation in Hebrew pointing in manuscripts and printed editions, even leaving aside for the moment discussion of the various Hebrew pointing traditions themselves. But, although KHOLEM following LAMED is indeed orthographically a somewhat special case (due to the fact that LAMED is the only Hebrew character to extend above the scribal line and the extension is precisely from the upper left corner of the glyph where you "want" to place the KHOLEM), I have nevertheless always seen it written between the LAMED and the following glyph but closer to the LAMED. This is certainly how it is taught and printed these days. I don't have my Bagster here at work but I would suspect if you looked closely, the location of the KHOLEM would be as I have suggested. If not I suspect this is idiosyncratic to works printed on that press. [I did however misspeak technically when I said "after the consonant OVER which it is written". The KHOLEM pronounced after LAMED is indeed written OVER the scribal line, but is written directly AFTER the LAMED.] >> 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. > >And if those dots were above different letters there were no reason why >they should share. I must be missing your point here; this seems to support what I was saying. But I'm surprised that no one has provided the one possible counterexample to my statement about no vowel preceding its consonant (an example I completely forgot about when writing my former post) - furtive pathach (as in the second a-vowel in SaMeaKH). Depending on your linguistic persuasion you might argue that the PATAKH here is a vowel glide, both written and pronounced, which is merely "extending" a non-a-vowel before guttural consonants in certain phonemic contexts. Or you might want to posit that it is the only example of a syllable in classical Hebrew beginning with a vowel - or an unwritten consonant. Probably more than we need to know about the originally posted problem, but I have a feeling that readers of this list enjoy, like I do, discussion of these orthographic quirks of the world's writing systems. 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