Kenneth Greifer wrote: ↑Sun Apr 21, 2024 7:11 pm
The problem for me is not just reading the Hebrew Bible because there are sites like Bible Hub that have word by word phonetic readings
I wouldn't trust those phonetic transcriptions at BibleHub. I'm guessing that that's where the weird ones I showed from
hebrewgreekbible.online came from. (Or both sites have a third, common source.) Bible Hub has the following suspect transcriptions of the two example words I've been using:
wə-rō-w-mam-tî
mê-rō-wm-mu-ṯe-ḵā
I'm not even concerned about how it handles the sheva distinctions we're talking about. What I find immediately, obviously suspect are those lonely syllables consisting merely of "w" and "wm". Surely in other cases it can handle a plain old
ḥolam malei?! Maybe its
vav problems are related to its struggle with
sheva.
Two transliterators you could try are the following (I'm not endorsing all their results, but they'll probably do better than BibleHub):
With my particular settings, they give, respectively,
- vaʀ̟oːˈmaːamtʰiː meːˈʀ̟oːmamuːˈθɛːχɔː
- Veʁoːˈmamtiː meːʁoːmemuˈteχaː
Kenneth Greifer wrote: ↑Sun Apr 21, 2024 7:11 pm
no one is explaining how you know which syllable is accented just from looking at a word in Hebrew in the Bible or anywhere else.
To find the stressed syllable of a word in the Bible, you have to learn how to read the accents. For some accents this is simple, they just sit on the first letter of the syllable that they are marking as stressed. For the two example words I've been using, both happen to be accented simply like this, with
zaqef qatan (looks like a
sheva (two vertically-aligned dots) but on top of the letter).
For other accents, in particular prepositives and postpositives, it is more complicated, particularly in the wildly popular but reader-unfriendly derivatives of WLC that are 99% of what you find on the Internet. Like BibleHub. For a more reader-friendly Hebrew text, I'd recommend editions of MAM like that on
Al-Hatorah,
Sefaria, or
Hebrew Wikisource.
Actually even one of the two example words I've been using is a little more complicated than I let on: there's a
munaḥ accent in one of the words that you need to skip over to find the later
zaqef qatan that indicates primary stress.
I don't know off the top of my head what the best source for accents is on the Internet. The best English language paper book (also available as an Adobe Digital Editions glorified PDF) is
Jacobson's book.