The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, Volume 1

OBP The form of Biblical Hebrew that is presented in printed edi� ons, with vocaliza� on and accent signs, has its origin in medieval manuscripts of the Bible. The vocaliza� on and accent signs are nota� on systems that were created in Tiberias in the early Islamic period by scholars known as the Tiberian Masoretes, but the oral tradi� on they represent has roots in an� quity. The gramma� cal textbooks and reference grammars of Biblical Hebrew in use today are heirs to centuries of tradi� on of gramma� cal works on Biblical Hebrew in Europe. The paradox is that this European tradi� on of Biblical Hebrew grammar did not have direct access to the way the Tiberian Masoretes were pronouncing Biblical Hebrew.


PRONUNCIATION IN THE MIDDLE AGES I.4.1. PRELIMINARY REMARKS
The Tiberian pronunciation was highly prestigious when it was a living oral tradition ( §I.0.9.). For this reason, many readers strove to adopt it in their reading of the Bible and orthoepic measures were taken to ensure that it was pronounced correctly and distinctly. The fact that the Tiberian pronunciation was the ideal target of readers of the Bible is reflected by the fact that many manuscripts pointed with Babylonian and Palestinian vowel signs display a tendency to convergence with the Tiberian tradition.
Although the prestigious Tiberian pronunciation tradition was the ideal target, many readers fell short of achieving this target due to imperfect learning and interference from other reading traditions and vernacular languages. 1 This is reflected by the fact that manuscripts with Babylonian and Palestinian systems of vocalization that were adapted to the Tiberian tradition rarely exhibit complete convergence. Even those of a manuscript such as I Firkovtich Evr. I B 3 (Codex Babylonicus 1 For the phenomenon of imperfect learning and its role in conditioning linguistic change see Thomason and Kaufman (1988, 251-55) and Thomason (2001, 66-76). Petropolitanus), which appears to represent the Tiberian tradition very closely, exhibits some differences from the tradition of the inner circle of the Tiberian Masoretic school ( §I.2.5.8.).
The various Non-Standard Tiberian manuscripts that have come down to us from the Middle Ages exhibit some developed orthoepic features of the Tiberian tradition, such as the extended use of dagesh, but in many cases their vocalization reflects a reading that falls short of the Tiberian model.
The Karaite transcriptions into Arabic script exhibit readings of various degrees of closeness to the Tiberian tradition.
Most are very close, whereas a few reflect a reading that falls short of the Tiberian ideal due to imperfect learning and interference. The transcriptions are particularly important for our understanding of the processes at work that resulted in such a failure to reach the ideal target. The discussion in this chapter, therefore, will be based to a large extent on the evidence from the transcriptions.
The failure to achieve the target is due to imperfect learning and the impact of the phonology of a substrate on the production of the reading. The key process involves the matching of phonetic sounds in the Tiberian target pronunciation with phonemic prototypes in the substrate rather than learning the Tiberian phonemic prototypes and matching the phonetic sounds with these. This can lead to a distribution of sounds that does not correspond to that of the Tiberian target. Such a suboptimal outcome can be classified into two types. (i) The distribution of sounds may correspond to that of the substrate. (ii) The distribution of sounds may correspond neither to that of the substrate nor to that of Tiberian target. In the latter case, the resulting type of pronunciation can be said to be a 'hypercorrection'.

I.4.2. CONSONANTS
The main case study concerning the interference of a substrate in the achievement of a Tiberian target in the reading of consonants is the pronunciation of the interdental consonants. 'when writing') The fact that in many places the manuscript has thāʾ where expected in the Tiberian tradition shows that the reading that it represents is not a type of Sefardi reading without any interdental consonants such as those discussed above. It appears to be an attempt at reading with a Tiberian pronunciation. The reader was successful in achieving the correct pronunciation of fricative tav in many places, but in several cases interference from a substrate resulted in this being read incorrectly as a stop. The rafe sign written over tāʾ in some cases reflects the reader's Tiberian target, which was not achieved.
It is significant to note that in this manuscript transcriptions of Tiberian fricative tav with the Arabic stop tāʾ are much more common in the Hebrew words that are embedded within the Arabic commentary. None of these is marked with the rafe sign, e.g.  (2017) for phonological processes that take place in language contact situations. In the spoken vernacular of the reader, there was not an unvoiced interdental phoneme /θ/ but only a stop phoneme /t/ or, more likely, /tʰ/, i.e. an aspirated unvoiced stop. This had only stops as its phonetic realization, i.e.

‫۟حت‬ ‫ل‬ ‫شۖ‬ ‫مۚ‬
[tʰ] and most likely also deaspirated [t]. When the reader heard in the Tiberian pronunciation the interdental phonetic tokens   Rand for these references] and for texts with Palestinian vocalization see Revell (1970a;1970b) and Yahalom (1997). into how the signs were pronounced and the phonological processes that lay behind these interchanges of signs.

Interchanged Signs
Of particular interest in this regard is the Karaite transcription in BL Or 2555. This manuscript exhibits an interchange of ṣere and segol signs in syllables where the vowel is long. In the transcription such vowels are represented sometimes by Arabic ʾalif and sometimes by Arabic yāʾ. This can be interpreted as reflecting the fact that the scribe read each of the two vowel signs with two different qualities. These may be reconstructed as [ This shows that interchanges of vowel signs can reflect a pronunciation with interchanges of vowel qualities that is independent of the interchange of the signs. This situation can be explained by the model used above ( §I.4.2.). We may assume that the reader had only one long 'e' vowel prototype phoneme in the pronunciation tradition that he was most competent in. We can represent this as /ē/ and assume that it had the phonetic token The interchange is sporadically found, however, also in early model manuscripts that have a vocalization that is otherwise standard Tiberian. One such manuscript is II Firkovitch Evr. There is evidence of this phenomenon even in L. In Deut.
28.11 BHS has the form ‫ָךִֶ֖‬ ְ ‫ת‬ ‫מְ‬ ‫הַ‬ ‫בְ‬ 'your cattle' with a pataḥ in place of an expected segol, which occurs elsewhere in this form in L and also in Deut. 28.11 in other early model manuscripts (e.g. S

‫הִֶ‬ ‫בְ‬ ‫ָךִֶ֖‬ ְ
‫ת‬ ‫מְ‬ ). Golinets (2013, has shown that the pataḥ in L was written over an original segol by a second hand after, it seems, the ink of the segol had become faint. It is not clear at what period this second hand made this change, but it reflects the type of segol-pataḥ interchange that is discussed here.
Some Non-Standard Tiberian manuscripts exhibit a tendency to substitute pataḥ for segol specifically in the environment of gutturals, e.g. In these medieval vocalized Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts the Tiberian qameṣ sign is generally restricted to the representation of the /a/ vowel in the diphthong /aw/, reflecting, it seems, the partial phonetic assimilation of the vowel to /w/, which resulted in a back open-mid quality close to that of Tiberian qameṣ, i.e. This suggests that the range of phonetic allophones of Arabic /a/ included also [ɔ].

‫ת‬ ‫וַ‬
The existence of a range of qualities in the phonetic allophones of Arabic /a/ and /ā/ that corresponded to those of the Tiberian vowels pataḥ, segol, ṣere and qameṣ would have facilitated the matching of the Arabic prototypes with these four phonetic qualities. One may say that the three-way and four-way interchanges reflect a lesser ability to perceive the distinct qualities of the Tiberian vowels than the two-way pataḥ-segol interchange and so a lesser competence in the Tiberian pronunciation. 10 10 Such a breakdown in the perception of differences in vowel qualities is reflected also in the rhymes of some medieval Hebrew poetry, in which, for example, a syllable with qameṣ can rhyme with a syllable with ṣere (Rand 2020).