B-Hebrew: The Biblical Hebrew Forum

In Gen. 49:11 we read
כִּבֵּס בַּיַּיִן לְבֻשׁוֹ וּבְדַם עֲנָבִים סוּתֹה
NIV: "he will wash his garments in wine, his robes in the blood of grapes."
with כִּבֵּס marked with a tsere under the letter B, as is customary in the piel construction. I tend to think that the two horizontal dots of the tsere mark a compromise for the horizontal stroke of the patah. Indeed, I surmise that a common אחד העם listener would equanimously accept the reading כִּבַּס with a patah under the B, in analogy with the שִׁלַח of Ex. 8:28 (of course, now a days that every listener has punctuated printed book in front of him, has his ears pricked up, and is lying in ambush, ready to pounce on the reader with a raucous emendation at the tiniest hint of deviation, it is risky to put an A for an E.)
Surprisingly, in Nu. 19:10 it is וְכִבֶּס with a segol under the letter B. Is this segol a compromise marking for the resembling qametz וְכִבָּס?

Isaac Fried, Boston University

The segol-for-qametz is evident in the plural form of the segolates:
אֶבֶן - אֲבָנִים with an initial hateph-pathah as a compromise between a patah and a schwa.
בֹּקֶר - בְּקָרִים with an initial schwa reducing the number of vowels to but two.
גֶּשֶם - גְּשָמִים with an initial schwa reducing the number of vowels to but two.
But
אֶצְבַּע - אֶצְבָּעוֹת since this segol is a compromise between an E and a hireq, as evidenced by the dot (dagesh) in the letter B.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

What is of interest to me is how kin this is to what happens in English. Notice a word like DISCREET, /dəskrēt/ and DISCRETION, /dəˈskreSH(ə)n/ (I should be using IPA here but too many on this forum lack even the basics of linguistic knowledge). Here the native speaker intuitively shortens the tonally long vowel (spelled [ee] and pronounced /ē/ (/i/) to /e/ (/ɛ/) in order to preserve some sense of word length (duration). Notice how the schwas in both words help isolate the syllable that takes the stress of the word. Notice also how the instinct to maintain word duration results in the second schwa (the last syllable of [discretion] is not vocalized by most English speakers (note it is in parentheses).

I agree with you that the initial schwa (no schwa "mobile" for me) in גְּשָמִים G$AMIYM (instead of, say, GE$AMIYM) stands for a vowel squashed to minimize the number of puffs in the word and hasten thereby the speech. Yet, the nagging puzzle persists as to why the single form is GE$EM, 'rain', with a segol, an E, under the letter shin, whereas the plural form G$AMIYM is with a qametz, an A, under the same letter shin?

My assumption that the tsere is a compromised patah encounters a hurdle in the noun אֵבוּס EBUS, 'manger', of Isaiah 1:3, for a patah under the initial letter A, would have implied a dot (dagesh) in the next letter B. To extricate myself from this difficulty I assume that the correct punctuation of this word is an A with a hypothetical hateph-tsere, to make the name correspond to, say, גְּבוּל GBUL, 'margin, border', starting with a schwa under the letter G followed by a dageshless B.

Isaac Fried, Boston University