SteveMiller wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 9:41 am
This is a question from one of my students in a class that I am assistant teaching.
Why is the letter tav with a sheva vowel transliterated as "th" in "hithpael"?
It is still pronounced as just "t".
Thanks.
Nothing to do with a shva mark! (And by the way, calling a shva a vowel is questionable! A silent shva is iirc not a vowel, and a vocal shva is iirc considered maybe a half vowel).
It's to do with a dagesh. For example you have Bet and Vet..
Look at the letters BGDKFT
They can be written with a dagesh or without.
In ancient hebrew academics believe that they'd have done all 6 as soft or hard.
BGDKFT..
Dalet without dagesh would be pronounced TH as in THe.
Tav without dagesh would be pronounced TH as in baTH.
You can write a word according to the sound, e.g. Father would be Av (That's transcription)
Or, you can write it according to the letter making sure that no two letters are written the same. So Father would be Abh (That's transliteration)
b for bet. bh for bet without dagesh.
dh for dalet without dagesh.
th for tav without dagesh.
Jewish people that learnt hebrew in school and follow that convention / or, simply, jewish society generally, tends to write words as they sound e.g. Chanukah. (which makes it easy to sound out words correctly, though it makes it easy to forget whether a word is spelt with e.g. a Chaf or a Chet). So a word like Shechinah is easy to pronounce..
But in the academic world they tend to prefer transliteration So dh for talet, th for tav without dot. So they'd write e.g. Shekhinah (note the Kh rather than ch). Perhaps not as intuitive to pronounce immediately,but does make clear whether it's a Chaf or a Chet. And they may even use scientific transliteration.. which has all sorts of latin looking characters. They also use "w" for the 6th letter, that is because a)in ancient hebrew it's believed that it was a w. And b)the letter doesn't get mixed up with bet -b-, or bet without dagesh. bh.