Page:Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar (1910 Kautzsch-Cowley edition).djvu/76

 of the vowel, and that the prehistoric  became  before being shortened to. In cases like (from ),  (from ) the dropping of the  shows that the original vowel is completely lost.

The sound ĕ has been adopted as the normal transcription of simple, although it is certain that it often became assimilated in sound to other vowels. The LXX express it by, or even by , ,  , more frequently by , , , but very frequently by assimilating its indeterminate sound to the following principal vowel, e.g.  ,   (as well as ),  ,. A similar account of the pronunciation of is given by Jewish grammarians of the Middle Ages.

How the sound has arisen through the vanishing of a full vowel is seen, e.g. in  from, as the word is still pronounced in Arabic. In that language the full short vowel regularly corresponds to the Hebrew.

2. Connected with the is the  or  (correptum), i.e. a  the pronunciation of which is more accurately fixed by the addition of a short vowel. There are three -sounds determined in this way, corresponding to the three vowel classes :—

, e.g., ass.

, e.g., to say.

, e.g., , sickness.

These, or at least the first two, stand especially under the four guttural letters , instead of a , since these letters by their nature require a more definite vowel than the indeterminate. Accordingly a guttural at the beginning of a syllable, where the is necessarily vocal, can never have a mere.

On the shorter Ḥaṭef as compared with  cf. .

Rem. A. Only and  occur under letters which are not gutturals. is found instead of (especially ), chiefly (a) under strengthened consonants, since this strengthening (commonly called doubling) causes a more distinct pronunciation of the, ,. According to the rule given by Ben-Asher (which, however, appears to be unknown to good early MSS. and is therefore rejected by Ginsburg,, p. 466; cf. Foote, Johns Hopkins Univ. Circulars, June 1903,