Towards Better Davening and Torah Reading And sometimes, we find a word that is only "sort of" like a double MIL-EIL. Vayeira has such a word: ha-O-hela - Avraham rushed TO THE TENT. The accent, as you can tell from the TROP-mark, is on the second syllable, O. The word is pronounced ha-O-hela. Lower case letters are unaccented; uppercase letters indicate the accented syllable. However, although it sounds like there are 4 syllables altogether, there are really only three. ha is the first one. O is the second one. And since the vowel under the second HEI is a CHATAF-SEGOL, it is a very short vowel and is treated like a SH'VA NA, meaning it is considered to be part of the following syllable, rather than its own. So the third and last syllable of the word is hela. That means that the word is regular MIL-EIL, being accented on the next to the last syllable. But it still sounds to us like a double MIL-EIL word, which is why we've decided to review this topic with its subtleties. Another word in Vayeira that is like ha-O-hela is "to TZO'AR", TZO’ARA. Same thing. A pretend double MIL-EIL. [The Parshat Vayeira Homepage]
|
