B-Hebrew: The Biblical Hebrew Forum

Jonathan,
I am greatly interested in what you are saying:
3. מִזֶּ֣רַע — gemination of the zayin due to assimilation of the /n/ of /min/
Yet it is not clear to me what triggers the gemination due to the assimilation. Is the inner dot, the dagesh, placed in the zayin of מִזֶּ֣רַע to remind the reader of the lost /n/ of /min/, and only as a byproduct we get a gemination? Or is the gemination a vocal marker to recall the omission of the /n/ of /min/?
Is it the same thing with the dagesh following the initial HA, 'the', as in verse four
הָאֵל הַגָּדוֹל וְהַנּוֹרָא?

Isaac Fried, Boston University

Isaac Fried wrote:Jonathan,
I am greatly interested in what you are saying:
3. מִזֶּ֣רַע — gemination of the zayin due to assimilation of the /n/ of /min/
Yet it is not clear to me what triggers the gemination due to the assimilation. Is the inner dot, the dagesh, placed in the zayin of מִזֶּ֣רַע to remind the reader of the lost /n/ of /min/, and only as a byproduct we get a gemination? Or is the gemination a vocal marker to recall the omission of the /n/ of /min/?
Is it the same thing with the dagesh following the initial HA, 'the', as in verse four
הָאֵל הַגָּדוֹל וְהַנּוֹרָא?

Isaac Fried, Boston University

There is no definite theory for the gemination that follows the definite HA-. There are speculations. One observation I have is that where gemination does not occur the Tiberians lengthened the pathaq to a qametz: /haa-eel/. So what seems to drive the gemination is an unconscious desire to maintain word length. By that I mean the amount of time it takes to say the word. In הַגָּדוֹל, the first syllable /hɑg/ has the same length as the /hɑ̄̄ɑ̄/ (IPA /ɔ/). Or put the other way around: what drives the lengthening of the pathaq to a qametz is the desire to maintain the length that would be there if the following consonant were geminated. In the case of הָאֵל, the consonant aleph cannot geminate.

As for the gemination of a consonant following the preposition min. You asked, "Is the inner dot, the dagesh, placed in the zayin of מִזֶּ֣רַע to remind the reader of the lost /n/ of /min/, and only as a byproduct we get a gemination? Or is the gemination a vocal marker to recall the omission of the /n/ of /min/?"
The answer to both of these questions is no. The gemination happened historically over time. The dagesh is just a convention used by the Masoretes to describe how they pronounced the word. The missing /n/ is inferred by linguistic analysis. Note the following from an article I pulled from /jewishstudies.rutgers.edu/:
Here's two screenshots showing the part of the article he is referring to:

Jonathan,

Could you give us a more complete URL for that article? I looked at the site and it wasn't clear where I could find it...

Thanks!

Kirk

Jonathan,

I find what you are saying very interesting, yet there is still one question nagging me: how do you know that the dagesh in the zayin of מִזֶּ֣רַע is a gemination marker?

Isaac Fried, Boston University

Kirk Lowery wrote:Jonathan,

Could you give us a more complete URL for that article? I looked at the site and it wasn't clear where I could find it...

Thanks!

Kirk

Sure,

Here it is:
http://jewishstudies.rutgers.edu/docman ... gy-bh/file

Isaac Fried wrote:Jonathan,

I find what you are saying very interesting, yet there is still one question nagging me: how do you know that the dagesh in the zayin of מִזֶּ֣רַע is a gemination marker?

Isaac Fried, Boston University

Jonathan,

Thanks for the explanation, I much better understand now the traditional arguments on the dagesh. It all falls now in place: יִדֹּר, for instance, has a dagesh placed in the /d/ by the NAQDANIYM of Tiberias to bring to the reading יד-דוֹר to accommodate the traditionally heard lengthening of the /d/ to fill the void left by the lost /n/ of an ancient, now defunct, יִנְדוֹר.
I infer that the same is true of other words like כִּסֵּא KISE, 'chair', in which the dagesh in the /s/ is tattooed in to bring on the prolonged reading KIS-SE, as a historically intuitive compensation for a presumed ancient reading KI(R)SE, with a now lost /r/. Otherwise, שָבִיט SHAVIYT, 'comet', is written with a (relatively long) qametz to bring to the stretched reading ששביט to leave a vocally unconscious memorial for the lost /r/ of שרביט SHARVIYT of old.
It is fascinating to contemplate how two opposite intuitive linguistic, or phonetic, tendencies instinctively combine to shape, according to this theory, the reading of such words as מִזֶּ֣רַע. At first the hurried Hebrew speaker takes the מִן זֶרָע, merges it and reduces it to the one squeezed word מִזֶּ֣רַע by chopping off the /n/ of min. But then the same hacker and packer, or his remorseful descendants, intuitively feels, or being chastised by the purists of the age, that something is missing in this just composed tight word and he undertakes to lengthen back the zayin of מִזֶּ֣רַע to regain the original duration of מִן זֶרָע.

Still, how to explain the dagesh in, say, the /b/ of גִּבּוֹר GIBOR (GIB-BOR), 'hero', or in the /sh/ of יִשָּׁמֵר YI$AMER (YI$-$AMER), a nifal form of the root שמר?

Isaac Fried, Boston University

Isaac Fried wrote:Jonathan,

Thanks for the explanation, I much better understand now the traditional arguments on the dagesh. It all falls now in place: יִדֹּר, for instance, has a dagesh placed in the /d/ by the NAQDANIYM of Tiberias to bring to the reading יד-דוֹר to accommodate the traditionally heard lengthening of the /d/ to fill the void left by the lost /n/ of an ancient, now defunct, יִנְדוֹר.

Yes, you got it. It's actually quite common across language groups. In Western Europe the most ubiquitous example of language wide gemination is Italian. Examples: gd-dd (magdalena-maddalena); gm-mm (pragmaticus -prammatico); etc...
I did find this comment in a forum:

Almost any of those aren't case of "gemination". Only "x: xx" is a case of gemination; instead, "xy: yy" is a case of aximilation, wich is very common in a musical and gentle language that italian is.
Some examples:

"amazon: amazzone": gemination;

"doctrina: dottrina": regressive assimilation.

He's referring to the process, I'm referring to the result, and in both cases the result is gemination.

Isaac Fried wrote:I infer that the same is true of other words like כִּסֵּא KISE, 'chair', in which the dagesh in the /s/ is tattooed in to bring on the prolonged reading KIS-SE, as a historically intuitive compensation for a presumed ancient reading KI(R)SE, with a now lost /r/. Otherwise, שָבִיט SHAVIYT, 'comet', is written with a (relatively long) qametz to bring to the stretched reading ששביט to leave a vocally unconscious memorial for the lost /r/ of שרביט SHARVIYT of old.

Possibly. Is there some kind of evidence that the more ancient forms of these words had a /r/ in them?

Isaac Fried wrote:It is fascinating to contemplate how two opposite intuitive linguistic, or phonetic, tendencies instinctively combine to shape, according to this theory, the reading of such words as מִזֶּ֣רַע. At first the hurried Hebrew speaker takes the מִן זֶרָע, merges it and reduces it to the one squeezed word מִזֶּ֣רַע by chopping off the /n/ of min. But then the same hacker and packer, or his remorseful descendants, intuitively feels, or being chastised by the purists of the age, that something is missing in this just composed tight word and he undertakes to lengthen back the zayin of מִזֶּ֣רַע to regain the original duration of מִן זֶרָע.

They are not really opposing tendencies. The generation that dropped the /n/ from min naturally doubled the remaining consonant. A subsequent phase might include dropping the geminate. Here's a case where this happened by the time the Masoretes began their work.

Isaac Fried wrote:Still, how to explain the dagesh in, say, the /b/ of גִּבּוֹר GIBOR (GIB-BOR), 'hero', or in the /sh/ of יִשָּׁמֵר YI$AMER (YI$-$AMER), a nifal form of the root שמר?

Isaac Fried, Boston University

[/quote]

With גִּבּוֹר, I don't know, since it's a begadkefat consonant. As for יִשָּׁמֵר, you're probably correct. This is an instance where the Tiberian pronunciation helps us with meaning where the consonantal text would fail, since the /n/ of the NIFAL is gone as early as the writing of the consonantal text. It also shows that gemination was early as well, not just a late phenomenon in post biblical times.

I suspect that the ending -AT of גַּת is the personal pronoun אַת, and גַּ is short for גאה GA'AH. So possibly also גִּית GIYT or גַּיִת GAYIT. Compare the verbal forms עָשָׂה ASAH, 'he did', and עָשִׂית ASIYT, you (f.) did.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

What I claim in my previous post is that with a three-consonant root it is
הוּא שָמַר and את שָׁמַרְתְּ, where שָׁמַרְתְּ = שמר-את.
But, for a root ending in -H, which I think is short for היא HIY, 'he/she', it is
הוּא עָשָׂה HU ASAH, 'he did', and את עָשִׂית AT ASIYT, you (f.) did. apparently, the silent ה of עָשָׂה recovers to reassert itself as a full fledged, clearly heard, IY in עָשִׂית ASIYT.

Isaac Fried, Boston University