User talk:2620:117:C080:520:1A03:73FF:FE0A:7269

Your changes to the transliteration of Biblical quotations to reflect ancient pronunciations are incomplete. That is to say there are changes that you missed. Please don't do this just because you think it's right. And if you're going to do it.... —  [Ric Laurent] — 15:49, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Please, enlighten me. I am of course an amateur at this, but I thought it necessary that the Torah passages not be in Israeli Hebrew. I know I neglected to distinguish between ע and א; this is simply for technical reasons. If there are other things I missed, please, I would love to know. I am especially unclear on whether certain letters with dagesh are meant to be doubled or not.


 * Neither did you distinguish between ג and גּ. I think you should maybe refrain from making these sorts of changes until you learn all these details. Biblical Hebrew is intricate. —  [Ric Laurent] — 19:09, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

The intent was to convey the pronunciation insofar as we can determine it; I was (and am) under the impression that ג was pronounced identically with or without dagesh, and there was no sound like the Arabic غ except in the Yemeni dialect, which was influenced by Arabic. Just as we cannot say whether שׂ was pronounced differently than ס, I would make no attempt to preserve the distinction in transliteration. No effort was made to distinguish between ע and א simply because Wikipedia uses "ambidextrous" quotation marks; I am, of course, aware that they carry very different phonetic values.

Of course, I would much rather someone more experienced in Biblical Hebrew like you yourself make such edits, as my specialty is Arabic, but I think that given the nature of a collaborative forum like a wiki, it's only preferable that an imperfect attempt be made and corrected by other users than that we keep a blatantly Ashkenazi transliteration of an Ancient Hebrew text.


 * Well your impression was not correct and in ancient times dagesh affected more letters than you've realized.
 * א and ע could easily be differentiated using ʾ and ʿ just like we do for ء and ع.
 * The transliteration we use is not remotely Ashkenazic, much less blatantly. Please don't make these edits. —  [Ric Laurent] — 20:33, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Let's be clear here, by "more letters than you've realized" you mean the one. Obviously the fact that the Masoretes saw the need to add a dagesh to ג means that at some point, there was a phonetic distinction, as there was between שׂ and ס, but I am incredulous because I was explicitly taught (using Lambdin, which follows a Masoretic system) that ג and גּ are phonetically identical. The text distinguishes them for the sake of orthographic fidelity, just as it distinguishes between long vowels with and without matres lectionis, but of course, seeing as I was only aiming to transcribe pronunciation and not maintain a 1-to-1 orthographic correlation (since it was, after all, printed in Hebrew directly above), I didn't see any need to distinguish between the two, just as I would not have distinguished between שׂ and ס for the same reason. Along similar lines, I thought the distinction between ע and א would be clear enough that I need not bother with directional quotation marks, but you are right, it is certainly more accurate to disambiguate them. The previous transliteration seems to reflect modern Israeli Hebrew - "Ashkenazi" is perhaps a misnomer, would you prefer "European"? I certainly didn't mean to suggest that the taw is pronounced like an 's' or anything like that.

Again, I recognize quite frankly my inexperience in transcribing Biblical Hebrew, but I expected you to be critiquing careless errors in my vowelling or the like - not my use of Masoretic pronunciation. From everything I've read on the subject, tracing Hebrew pronunciation any further back than that is extremely dubious and uncertain, but if you can produce a more precise transcription of Ancient Hebrew, I would gladly defer to you.


 * I don't know whether it's just the one. Maybe you know about the million pronunciations of ת, maybe not.
 * At any rate it is still folly to quibble, at this point, over the transliteration we use. We use quotations from every period of Hebrew history. Wiktionary will never be good enough to warrant using different transliteration systems for quotes from each period and localized form. This would be insanity.
 * Transliteration is a crutch. People should just learn an accent of Hebrew. Or two if they want, whatever. There is no serious disservice to the reader by using a generally modern Israeli transliteration system, considering that most Hebrew speakers today are using (or trying to use) that accent. A person seriously trying to learn Biblical Hebrew is going to be using a much better source than this shitcan. Anyone else is either not looking for something super serious, or they read Hebrew well enough that they don't need the transliteration anyway. Anyway. Please leave it alone. If you care about Hebrew that much, Wiktionary has much more pressing needs in the area. —  [Ric Laurent] — 08:02, 11 March 2015 (UTC)