There is no new DAVENING column in
this week's TT. Last week we focused on the SH'VA NAs in the SH'MA. We "dismissed" 75 of the 92 SH'VA NAs as being at the beginning of a word, and therefore naturally said with a slight vowel sound, which is correct. Words like V'HAYU, V'SHINANTAM, L'TOTAFOT, Y'MEI- CHEM, K'DOSHIM... and the like are hard to mess up. The opening consonant needs a brief vowel sound to get you to the next letter. But this is not always so. It isn't always easy to pronounce a letter with a SH'VA NA at the beginning of a word properly - especially for native English speakers. And this is because of our experience with "initial consonant blends". words with B and R as the first two letters are correctly pronounced in English with the B and R blended smoothly. We say BRUNCH, not b'runch. BREAD, not b'read. But in Hebrew, when a word begins with BET and REISH, with a SH'VA under the BET, the BET and REISH sounds are NOT blended. The word for blessing is B' RACHA, not bracha. Many (most?) English-speakers find this difficult. GLIDE in English, but G'LIDA is Hebrew for ice cream, not glida. There are many consonant blends in English and each challenges us to separate them in Hebrew, even as we must blend them in English. The first word of SH'MA presents that challenge. One of several Yiddish words that have made their way into English is SHMOOZE. This is an initial consonant blend of the digraph SH and the letter M. In Hebrew, they are slightly separated by the slight vowel sound of the SH'VA NA. SH'MA. Not shma. And not an exaggerated SHEMA either. All SH'VAs under the first letter of the word do not allow a consonant blend. One ALMOST exception... Statement made was "All SH'VA under the first letter of a word is NA and gets a very short vowel sound. This does not allow the first two consonants to blend (as they would in English). One ALMOST exception..." The feminine form of the word for 2, a very old dispute. Some say that the first letter of SHTEI and SHTAYIM and SHTEIM-ESREI is a SHIN with a SH'VA NACH and that the TAV that follows it has a DAGESH KAL. That would allow the SH and the T sounds to blend, like they do in the English slang word from Yiddish, SHTICK. The other opinion is that the SHIN's SH'VA is NA, like ALL initial letters, and the words are pronounced SH'TEI, SH'TAYIM. [The Parshat B'shalach Homepage]
|
