An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax

problem with these words, as there sometimes is with the ‘pen’/’pin’ pair, because
there are no words minimally contrasting to ‘rent,’ ‘sent,’ and ‘went.’
c The phoneme is not a sound as it is produced in the throats and mouths of a
speaker, but rather an abstraction based on how speakers use the sound in the
words of a language. Phonemes, the minimal meaningful sounds in a language, do
not exist as such; they are the set of sounds we make and hear in our language,
irrespective of such obstacles as background noise or personal idiosyncrasy.
Speakers of a language may vary tremendously and yet manage to understand
each other, because each intuitively knows the sound system of the language and
interprets the stream of speech in terms of that system.
d We have mentioned some sources of sound variations, such as personal speech
variations and dialect variations (the pen/pin dialect of American English, and the
pen ~ pin/pin dialect). [Page 51] There is another source of variation, the
linguistic environment of the sound; such variation is said to be conditioned, and
the variants are called allophones. For example, most speakers of English think of
their language as having a single k sound. But in fact the k in ‘key’ and ‘kin’
differs from the k in ‘ski,’ ‘skin,’ ‘sick,’ and ‘sock.’ (Put your finger in front of
your mouth to feel the difference in aspiration, which your ear is not trained to
detect, and note that only the first set is followed by a small puff of air, the result
of aspiration.) Though the two kinds of k are phonetically different, English
speakers consider them to be “the same sound,” because in the system of the
English language k initiating a syllable is always aspirated whereas k after s or at
the end of a syllable is always unaspirated; this phonetic difference is never
associated with a contrast in meaning, that is, it is never phonemic. 17 In contrast,
for example, Turkish does distinguish aspirated k (written k’) and unaspirated k,
and thus k’alb ‘dog’ is distinguished from kalb ‘heart.’
e Similarly, the variation of the “begadkepat letters” of Hebrew (so-called “hard”
and “soft” sounds) may be analyzed as allophones, on the view that the form that
occurs in a given context is predictable from the phonetic environment,
specifically whether a vowel or consonant precedes. On this view, the begadkepat
letters never lead to a contrast in meaning; note that b/v (~Hebrew בּ /b), d/ð (דּ
/ד), p/f (פּ /פ), and t/th (תּ /ת) are all contrasting pairs of phonemes in English.
f The greatest complexities of Hebrew phonology involve the vowels of the
language. A complex set of rules reduces vowels in some environments and
lengthens them in others; some rules insert vowels (anaptyxis) and others delete
~ approximately equal to
17 Actually English has a further contrast: the k in ‘skin’ is unaspirated and released,
while the k in ‘sock’ is unaspirated and nonreleased.