Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/504

500 sound, as =er, =wer, =her, =sechsten, =gem (gegen dem), =selb; or æ—always rhyming with e—as =braeht.

The value of this letter can, however, be modified. It is then accompanied by a segol or zere  and has the value of ê, as =geschê, =êr(e), =êlenden, and, strangely enough, always =verdêrben.

It is quite a characteristic feature of the ortography of our MS. to use rather extensively the diacritic signs. They are not only used, as in similar MSS., with pure Hebrew words in order to mark them as such and thus to avoid confusion, but also with German words, while a number of other words are as a rule devoid of their root-vowels. The zere, which is very frequently used, as well as segol we have already mentioned. The other diacritic sign is the kibbuz. It is the modification sign, and modifies u(e) into ü(e) and o into ö, as in künikeit, =ünden, =gezürnt, =müen, =güet(e), =gemüet, =söbn, =götlich, etc. In words like =buochen, =laden, =galgen, =hô, 924, 1004, the diacritic signs do not affect the reading at all, and are merely of an ornamental character.

The most remarkable of all these signs is the sheva. Like in Hebrew both kinds of the half-vowel with approximately the same functions are used; the 'silent sheva,' indicating that no vowel intervenes between the consonant under which it stands and the following letter, such as =gras, -wol, =plat, blat, =tram, =loesen, =toeten, =getoetet, =hüet and the 'sounding svheva,' representing a very short e, in =jihe, 394, 422.

The use of the consonants does hot require much explanation. The following remarks will suffice to characterise the orthography of our MS. in this respect. Gemination is, like in Hebrew, never indicated in Hebrew-German, although it exists in reality, as proved by rhymes. d in und is always dropped and replaced by an apostrophe, as =un' The f-sound is represented generally by, as =vun =fünf, =fur, vur, =fürst,=füess, =befolhen,