Рет қаралды 1,680
This pronunciation, used by the Masoretes in Early Medieval Galilee, is the one the Hebrew vowel signs we're all familiar with were actually designed to record. I decided to create such recordings because despite the profusion of data about this reading dialect and its importance for the later history of Hebrew (such as in the the development of the vocalization signs), I couldn't find anybody who had actually taken the liberty of making a recording that used all the most recent research on this dialect to give an idea of what it (may have) actually sounded like (for example, we now know that the vav was indeed labiodental in this dialect, and that vowel length was indeed at least somewhat contrastive.) As with all reconstructions, this is at more than one level hypothetical. In listening to this, you are doing something less like watching a documentary than watching a well-researched work of historical fiction.
In this case, unlike most of my Tiberian Hebrew videos, I used a speaking voice. There's abundant evidence that the Tiberian reading tradition and the pronunciation that went with it did not develop for normal speech. Much of it is only explicable in relation to language that is chanted or else some other form of exaggerated hyperspeach. But what if someone pronounced it as part of normal speech without cantillation? There must have been times when this happened. People must have had occasion quote Biblical passages to each other in conversation and the like. Odds are that when this happened, a less careful and exacting pronunciation was used.
I thought I'd take a crack at trying to make the Tiberian reading pronunciation work in a speaking voice, albeit a rather declamatory one, by loosening the productioin of overlong vowels in stressed closed syllables which Khan reconstructs for the Tiberian reading, and by being more flexible in where secondary stress is applied. It's still pretty close to hyperspeech, but it felt like the declamatory style could accomodate that.
Oh and also I included my translation of David's Lament in alliterative verse, because why not