In this episode of Hebrew Voices #211, The Taste of Scripture: Part 1, Nehemia discusses with Dr. Sophia Pitcher her revolutionary discovery of the ancient significance of the Biblical Hebrew accent marks.
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Hebrew Voices #211 – The Taste of Scripture: Part 1
You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.
Nehemia: Wow, so this is amazing stuff, guys. Guys, this is one of the most important interviews I’ve ever done.
Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m here with Dr. Sophia Pitcher, who earned her PhD from the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. She’s a research fellow with the University of the Free State, and she works with SIL Global on Bible translation, translating the Bible into languages for the first time. Those who follow the program have heard of Sophia because she has this groundbreaking… I don’t know if I want to call it discovery or hypothesis. I’ll decide throughout this program.
You probably don’t know this, Sophia, but I try to do what I call an SBL review, where I get people on to talk about what the best lectures they’ve heard at SBL are. And multiple people in multiple different years have mentioned your lectures as the best lectures they heard, maybe because they’re just the most innovative. Like, whether you’re right or wrong, I really don’t know, but you’re raising a question and offering an explanation that wasn’t satisfactory up until now, and you’re offering.
So, thank you for joining the program, Sophia. We’ve tried to have this for a while. We’ve been trying to do this and get together. Before we jump into the Hebrew accents, which… you are arguably the world’s foremost expert on the biblical accents, let’s say, in the biblical text. It’s interesting you’re working on translations, because I can see how that ties in. Give us a little bit about your background. You have kind of a really interesting story. When we first interacted, you said you were from Chicago. I said, “I’m from Chicago!”
Sophia: Yeah, so, that was really neat to see how our stories connect. I grew up in Chicago, the South Side of Chicago, and I went to school. I later learned that your grandmother was my biblical Hebrew teacher in elementary school. So, I went to school at Akiba Schechter in Hyde Park. And that is where I got my first introduction to the Hebrew language, and Jewish culture, and the Hebrew Bible, and its script, and the cantillation marks, all of that. And so, that’s kind of my introduction to how I got started with all of this.
Nehemia: So, I apologize for the question, but are you from a Jewish background?
Nehemia: So, then how did you end up going to Akiba Schechter? And by the way, just so people understand, Hyde Park is the area around the University of Chicago. Correct me if I’m wrong; I’m a North-Sider. And I know my parents spent part of their years growing up in Hyde Park. And they eventually migrated, like much of the Jewish community, to the North Side. But a lot of Jews stayed there, and so there was a Jewish school all the way on the South Side, in Hyde Park. And my grandmother used to drive every day from 7033 North Kedzie all the way down. That’s probably like, wow, I don’t know, over 10 miles. She would drive to her job five days a week, or whatever, in Hyde Park at Akiba Schechter. So, when you said Akiba Schechter, I said, “I’m sure my grandmother was your teacher.” And you have to understand; I’ll be having dinner with my sisters and my mother somewhere in Jerusalem, and we’ll meet somebody from Chicago, and my grandmother was their Hebrew teacher… from a certain generation, let’s say. So, it wasn’t that surprising. So, why did your parents send you to Akiba Schechter?
Sophia: It was a wonderful school, and as Christians, we really value the traditions that are the foundations of our beliefs.
Sophia: They were excited about me learning Hebrew, and learning Jewish culture, and just being exposed to all of the things that I had a chance to experience at Akiba Schechter.
Nehemia: That’s amazing. And this is probably something you don’t know. My grandmother, who was your Hebrew teacher, her grandfather, I want to say… I found these Hebrew newspapers from the late 1800’s. They’re on the National Library of Israel website. And he’s mentioned as leading a Zionist rally in a small town in Lithuania in 1898. So, there were Jews who were reading Hebrew and writing in Hebrew, and that was part of this national, essentially, Jewish revival in the late 1800’s.
Everybody says, “Eliezer Ben Yehuda revived Hebrew.” That’s kind of true, but it’s more complicated. Before Ben Yehuda, there were daily Hebrew newspapers in Eastern Europe. I think there were four of them, or there’s four online at the National Library of Israel. So, you learning Hebrew is essentially like a descendant of that, meaning, that’s where my grandmother knew Hebrew. She grew up being able to speak and read Hebrew, even though her native language was Yiddish. And then, she was a natural Hebrew teacher.
Alright, so that’s the background. Tell us, what is this thing with… you mentioned cantillation marks, and I was calling them Hebrew accent marks, or Ta’ami Mikra. We’ll get into that. That’s really the exciting part here, but I’m really fascinated. I didn’t know until we just got on that you work with these… you called them minority languages, that you’re working to try to translate the Bible into those languages for the first time at SIL, SIL International.
Nehemia: S-I-L. Okay, SIL Global. Oh, that’s the difference between like an acronym and… what’s that other thing called? There’s acronyms, and then there are things like where you say FBI, you don’t say FUBI. And I forget what the other term is.
Sophia: I’ve always heard it as S-I-L.
Nehemia: Oh, okay. SIL. I know them from the font. They have a really good… not so much anymore, but in the past, they had a really good… before Unicode, I suppose, you’d say, they had a really good Greek font for ancient Greek. And they had a good Hebrew font as well, with accents. Before Unicode, that was pretty much what you had to use. Now you can use Arial, for Hebrew at least.
So, SIL Global you work with… what is this? What’s a minority language? That’s interesting. Because I think every language that isn’t Chinese, English, or Spanish, or French, the big languages, and Russian maybe, are the minority languages in a sense.
Sophia: So, languages… many countries of the world, most countries of the world, have populations who speak multiple languages. And the languages that get the priority in that society are typically referred to as majority languages. And so, those are the ones that are broadly spoken no matter what your ethnicity is. They are languages that people are educated in and languages that are written down. And so, they have this cultural and social…
Nehemia: Okay, that’s really interesting. I lived in China for a year, and what I learned there… one statistic I read is there’s 258 mutually unintelligible languages, and that doesn’t include dialects. We’ll talk about dialects in a minute. So, I would meet people from all over, and they would tell me they spoke Mandarin, and they also spoke their local language. And I’m like, “Oh, so you speak two languages.” And they said, “Oh no, the local language isn’t a real language.”
“Well, what makes it not a real language?” Because there’s only one language in China. So, they’re like, “You foreigners are so silly. You think there’s Mandarin and Cantonese. Cantonese isn’t a real language. It’s a local language, a local dialect.” And there’s a term in Chinese, I think it’s Funwen or something. I’m sure that’s wrong, it’s been over 10 years. But there’s a term in Chinese for “local dialect”, and some local dialects are Sino-Tibetan languages. So, they really are related to Mandarin, which was the language of the capital in Beijing. And there’s other ones that are not Sino-Tibetan, so they have nothing to do with Chinese. They happen to be some tribe or nation that was conquered by the Chinese Empire back in the days of the Ming or the Qing or somebody, and they’ve now been swallowed up by China. So, in their mind, their language isn’t a real language.
So, that’s what you’re talking about. And the crazy thing is, there’s local dialects that have… like, for example… what are they called? The ones in western China, they have 80 million speakers, some of these local dialects. Local dialects, right, that aren’t real languages, which is much more than Hebrew!
Give us some examples of… I know you mentioned to me; you’re working with teams of some of these. So now I understand what a minority language is. What are some minority languages that, just to give us an idea… or countries, where they have these minority languages?
Sophia: So, one of the languages that… well, the language that I’m involved in now working with is South African Sign Language.
Sophia: In South Africa, not too long ago, about two years ago, South African Sign Language became the 12th official language.
Nehemia: Wait. So, when they sing the national anthem, in the past, they had 11 different languages, right? What do they do now when they sing the national anthem for sign language?
Sophia: I don’t know how South African Sign Language…
Nehemia: I’ve been told that there’s no South African who understands the entire national anthem. Maybe they learn a few words, but they don’t know all the 11 languages. Most people, I’m told, know maybe two or three or four languages.
Sophia: Yeah, I can’t speak to that, but yes. So, one of the things I think that is really important about, for example, having a language recognized, is there are some constitutional rights that come along with that recognition. And an important one is being able to have your first years of schooling in that language.
Sophia: And I’m not sure how South Africa is doing on fulfilling that or providing that for children, but it’s really important for children to be able to learn in the language that they use every day and speak. So, yeah.
Nehemia: So, I assume someone who speaks sign language is deaf. Is that safe to assume?
Nehemia: So, they would have to have their schooling in sign language, wouldn’t they?
Sophia: Well, there’s a lot that goes with that. Not all deaf education has been done that way, historically, necessarily, and so, deaf children have not been encouraged and always allowed to use their sign language in school, and they try to get the deaf children sometimes to vocalize and to learn to lipread.
Nehemia: I see. So, I have an interesting question that’s totally… I didn’t think we’d talk about any of this, but this is fascinating. We’re going to get to the accents. My question is, well, I guess there are a few questions. One is, is there one South African sign language or are there 11?
Sophia: So, language, as you know, and you kind of, just kind of alluded to this in your description of what people consider languages, and what’s official, it has a lot to do with politics and social connections. And as you know, South Africa, there was apartheid in South Africa, so the communities were separated. So deaf schools were separated by race. And so, I would say now, since the end of apartheid, people are coming together, and I think people are making a conscious decision to say, we have one South African sign language.
Sophia: And so, I would say it’s likely different communities that will use different signs for particular words, but when they come together, they can understand each other. They’ve seen these signs.
Nehemia: Wow, that’s really cool.
Sophia: So yeah, I would say it has more to do with a decision to say, “we are a united deaf community, and we are together going to develop our language and use our language together”.
Nehemia: So, that brings me into another question or statement, I don’t know, discussion. So, one of the things I’ll encounter from people, especially people online, is they’ll say, “Well, originally Hebrew didn’t have vowels.” And my response to that is, “Well, the vowels might not have been written down, but every language by definition has to have vowels and consonants, with one possible exception, which is sign language.” So, that’s a question I actually don’t know the answer to. I think they actually do have vowels. They spell out words, don’t they? I mean, maybe they’re not really vowels. Like, if they spell out words from spoken speech… and then how does that work with South African sign language, where the word in Xhosa might be different from the word in Zulu, or something? So, how do they spell out a word? Or do they do that? I don’t know.
Sophia: Probably a lot of that is coming from interacting and with hearing people, but I would imagine that when deaf people are together, they’re signing.
Nehemia: They’re not spelling. So, let me ask this, and I guess, again, I don’t know the answer here. Are the people who are learning South African sign language learning to read also a particular spoken language, if you can call a written language spoken? And that ties into the accents we’ll get to, the biblical accents.
Sophia: I really don’t know a lot about what deaf education has looked like for children in South Africa. But as you can imagine, learning to read, let’s say in English or any other language, when you’re deaf, and we’re born deaf, is really difficult.
Nehemia: I never thought about that, but that makes a lot of sense.
Nehemia: That’s really interesting. I didn’t think about that.
Sophia: Reading is easy for hearing speakers because the symbols… we’ve heard the words that are being represented on the page, and we have a way to connect the sounds that we’re hearing to these words on the page.
Sophia: And that process develops a long time before you even begin to read. And so, if a deaf person has never heard these sounds, connecting them to the written word is not easy.
Nehemia: Wow! So, you’re telling me… I never thought about that! So, every deaf person… maybe not every, but anybody who’s born deaf, I guess we have to say, who’s reading a written language is essentially reading a foreign language.
Nehemia: And that’s why the translation… because I’m thinking, why do we need it translated into sign language if it’s already written in English or Zulu or whatever the Bible is? So, you just answered the question. So how do you translate it? Does it have to be in video format?
Sophia: Yes. Yes, it’s in video format.
Nehemia: Oh, wow! That’s so cool!
Sophia: And you can see some of these video Bibles on Deaf Bible Society. They have an app.
Sophia: They’re constantly uploading translations that are being completed.
Nehemia: Oh, that’s so cool. Alright, that’s really cool. So now that actually has a relation to… So basically, like when I said, every language has vowels and accents… well, not vowels and accents. You’ll talk about that. Every language has vowels and consonants with the exception, possibly, of sign languages, so you’re essentially confirming that in a way. Meaning like, if it does, it’s essentially reproducing something from the spoken language. It’s not really native, in a way, to the sign language.
Sophia: Right. Sign languages are natural languages. They have syntax and grammar and phonology, and they have all of those things. They have all of the morphology. They have all of the structures of any language; it just looks different.
Nehemia: So, we’re talking about sign languages, and that, I think, is a great transition now to go into the accents in biblical Hebrew. So, our biblical texts… and like I said, there are people who say that Hebrew originally didn’t have vowels or accents. And so, what I think we can say, as scholars, is that they weren’t written down, but it had vowels.
In other words, when Isaiah was first written down, whoever wrote “ko ’amar” knew how to pronounce that. Now, maybe he didn’t pronounce it the way I do, but he pronounced it in some way, or she pronounced it in some way or another. So, what are the accents? What are the cantillation marks in the Bible?
Sophia: So, I’ve moved away from calling them cantillation marks because cantillation is something that I don’t really understand what it is in terms of how it relates to linguistics, how it links to… is it song? Is it speech? Is it something in between?
Nehemia: So, for the audience who doesn’t know, calling them… Let’s start with this; the accents are these little symbols that, when they read the Torah in the synagogue, they are, in a sense, chanting it, cantillating it. Neither of those terms are perfect. There’s a stylized way of reproducing each of these symbols and applying it to a syllable, and then each Jewish community may have a different way of doing that. And so, what’s the term that you prefer for these symbols?
Sophia: Well, I just call them Masoretic accents, Ta’ami Ha’mikra.
Sophia: But essentially, what we know is that it’s a dimension of the language that is on par with the vowels and the consonants. And so, I don’t like to use the term. I don’t use it; I’m pushing against it.
Nehemia: Okay, so accents. We can call it that.
Sophia: Cantillation, because that’s not well defined, and music, that’s something that I’m also pushing against, that I think the way that we consider, or maybe some communities, maybe, consider, the Masoretic accents, the sounds, the phenomena of the accents, as music, I think it’s because we haven’t really understood. We haven’t had a framework to understand what this dimension of language is that comes with the vowels and the consonants that you can’t separate from the spoken word, the text. And so, music, I think, doesn’t describe it. Melody… But it’s partly because we haven’t had a way to understand it, to deal with it, to connect it to the spoken, the uttered.
Nehemia: And I’ll have the editor throw up on the screen a page here from the Aleppo Codex. So, here is… there’s really four sets of symbols on this page. We have the letters, or we sometimes call them consonants, but really letters, because some of them are vowels, like the cholam male, the Vav, which is used as a vowel. We have letters, we have vowel points, and even that’s not a great, perfect term because Dagesh isn’t a vowel. We have accent marks, which is what we’re going to talk about, and then we have the Masoretic notes, which is for a separate discussion.
So, these accent marks, what I call accent marks, you call Masoretic. Why Masoretic? Tell us what that means.
Sophia: Because the Masoretes, they are medieval scribal scholars who preserved, who innovated the notation, the system of notation that we call the accents or the accentual system, or the Ta’ami Ha’mikra. They innovated them, and so that’s…
Nehemia: Can you explain the term Ta’ami Mikra for, let’s say, for those who don’t…
Sophia: Oh, so Ta’ami Ha’mikra, literally, “the tastes of the reading.”
Nehemia: Isn’t that interesting that it means taste?
Sophia: Yes, yes. The way it’s understood… described in the literature is that it provides the sense, the meaning. It gives a flavor to what is being said. So, there’s a layer, there’s a dimension, of the spoken word that shapes the meaning of what is said. And the reading, of course, is the reading of the Hebrew Scriptures. And it’s interesting, again, these words, like mikra, that’s a reading. It’s not a song. It’s not music. These are speech-related phenomena.
Nehemia: So, it’s interesting. In English, we’ll say Scripture, but the Hebrew word mikra, which is the word for Bible, let’s say, or the Hebrew Bible, literally means “that which is read.” Meaning, it’s something oral in a sense… not in a sense, it’s something which is… I guess you’re reading it, but you’re reading it out loud.
Nehemia: And that’s the important part.
Sophia: That’s something else where you have to do a shift with modern audiences, because, of course, our first sense of reading is typically silent reading. When we read, we don’t necessarily think about reading to other people and reading publicly and out loud and things like that.
Nehemia: And my understanding is that silent reading is a relatively modern, maybe early modern, kind of thing.
Sophia: Yes, mine too. Right.
Nehemia: So, when it talks about “meditate upon the Torah day and night,” it has the word hagah, which is to sort of “recite”, or… it’s the sound that a dove makes; it’s an oral thing. It’s something that’s verbalized.
Nehemia: Alright, so we have these accent marks. Let’s start with, what is the classic… and here’s where I think you bring some really important things to the table. What is the classic explanation? Because I wasn’t taught this was the classic explanation at Hebrew University. I was taught this was the explanation, and you’re just saying, “Okay, that’s a hypothesis.” What’s the classic explanation of these accent marks?
Sophia: So, I understand the accent marks to… that in the literature they’re kind of separated. So, the features of the accents are separated. We know that their primary feature is this melody feature that comes along with it, that is typically separated from how it actually functions in the text. So, the melody is set aside as kind of the music, or the chanting, something else. But then we have essentially these two types of accentual accent marks, one are conjunctives and one are disjunctives. And so, they essentially connect words to each other or separate them from one another.
The separating function is typically the most important function in terms of how the accent system is studied, and the separating function is attributed to pause. So, my understanding of pause is the lack of sound; a pause, stop, an interruption of the spoken word. And so, there’s a pausal break, a stop, and then you have a set of the disjunctives that have different values of breaks, essentially. Some are stronger breaks; some are less strong breaks. And so, they continually divide a verse… these breaks divide the verse into smaller and smaller sections until you can’t break down the verse any further. And they’re typically words that should be grouped together that are syntactically related. They are usually grouped together and have breaks after them. So, the disjunctives introduce pause into the text.
Nehemia: So, just to give an example for the audience; if we have the phrase Torat Moshe, “The Torah of Moses,” the word Torat will have a con-junctive accent on it that connects it to the next word. And then Moshe, well… it depends whatever comes after. It may have a conjunctive connecting it to something else, or it may have a dis-junctive if there’s a pause there.
So, you’ve talked about, in your lectures that I’ve heard, the law of continuous dichotomy, which is LCD.
Sophia: LCD, the law of continuous dichotomy.
Nehemia: Yeah, so is that the acronym LCD that you use?
Nehemia: Okay, so tell us what is the law of continuous dichotomy? And who either discovered it or made it up? Which is a big difference!
Sophia: Okay. So, William Wickes, an 18th century English scholar, formalized this description of how the accents divide a verse. And so, basically the verse is essentially divided in half, and then divided again, until the verse can no longer be divided. And typically, it’s divided into groups of two. So, you’ll commonly have, in one phrase, two words. And so, you’re constantly dividing a portion in two. The first half comes, and then you take that half and then you divide that half. Then you take that quarter, and you divide that in half until you can’t… until there’s nothing left to divide.
Nehemia: So, it goes into halves, and then quarters, and then eighths, and then 16ths, and 32ths, and then I think we have some verses, like in Numbers, where it’s into 64ths, where it’s like a really, really long verse. And so, that’s the law of continuous dichotomy, that it continually gets… and you can’t have more than two words without that being a unit, although “word” is defined a little bit differently than maybe we would define it. Sometimes they have really small words that are attached with a makaf, with a hyphen, so that’s treated as one word for the purpose of the accents. But under that definition, you really can’t have more than two words. I mean, if there’s three words, there has to be a division there. Or three-word units, maybe you want to call them. So, that’s the law; it’s William Wickes. I’m actually going to show the audience so they can actually view this book. This is significant; I’m going to share my screen here, and you can see it too.
So, here it’s on archive.org. William Wickes published this book in 1887, Oxford at the Clarendon Press. And what’s really significant for me about this is that, on the opening page, he has a photo from the Aleppo Codex. It says, “Facsimile of a page of the codex assigned to Ben Asher in Aleppo.” And that’s what we call today the Aleppo Codex. At the time he published this, that was still at the synagogue, the Jewish synagogue of, I think it was called the Cave of Eliyahu, the Cave of Elijah, in Aleppo. And in 1947, that synagogue was ransacked on November 29th when the United Nations declared the partition plan between a Jewish state and Arab state in Palestine, and the Arabs of Aleppo ransacked the synagogue and a third of the manuscript went missing. Some people say it was burned. Maybe it’s in somebody’s private hands somewhere. We don’t know. That page is missing, and our only documentation of that page is William Wickes’ book, which is pretty amazing.
Alright, so, William Wickes’ comes up with this law of continuous dichotomy. I guess he published it in 1887. He has a second volume, or I don’t remember which is the second volume…
Sophia: The first one was ’81…
Sophia: First one was ’81, so this one is the second one.
Nehemia: Okay, so this is a reprint from 1970. This is 1881. This one…
Nehemia: Ah, okay, there it is. “First published 1881.” So, this is on the three books: the books of Emet, or Ta’ami Emet, the three so-called poetical books. So, say something about the difference between the three books and the 21 books. We count the books in the Hebrew Bible as 24, which is… I would call it a typological number, meaning there aren’t actually 24, because the 12 minor prophets are counted as one book, but they’re 12 books. So, why are there two different books? And why does Wickes have two different volumes for this?
Sophia: So, they’re essentially two distinct orthographies to what look like to be two separate systems, although there is lots of overlap in terms of the symbols that are used in each. I don’t think we understand why there are two, other than likely there’s a difference in how they sound. But the three books are largely called the poetic books, although there’s poetry and prose in each of those. But the set of symbols is typically used in Job, Proverbs, and Psalms for the three books with a set of separate symbols, and for the 21, another set.
Nehemia: So, there’s two different types of accent marks; one for these three books, and then the rest for the other system for the other 21 books. Which is interesting because, if you go to, let’s say, an Ashkenazi synagogue, which I can speak about because I have more experience there, and you hear them recite the Torah using the accents of the 21 books, and then you hear them recite the Haftarah section, which is the Prophets portion, they’re using the same symbol, but they’re implementing them differently. And then they recite the Book of Lamentations, let’s say, with the same system they used for the Torah and the Prophets, and there’s a third way of reciting it for Lamentations. So, the musical, lets say, quality of that 21-book system is performed in a different way, at least by Ashkenazi Jews. I’m not sure if that’s the case in all the communities.
And then where it really gets creative is, each one of the so-called Five Scrolls, Lamentations and Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Esther, and… help me out here, whatever the fifth one… Did I say Ruth? Whatever the fifth one is. Each one has their own way of performing those musically, or cantillating them, even though linguistically, it seems almost ludicrous to say that they were different. Meaning, they’re the same set of symbols used, as far as I know, in the same way. Do you agree with that?
Sophia: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Nehemia: So, the musical implementations must have evolved later, just from that, I think.
Sophia: I mean, I’m certainly making a distinction in my work to separate that out, the way the symbols are realized in communities today, the traditions that we have recorded, that that’s separate from what we’re analyzing in the text. I don’t think any community is saying this is the way the Masoretes were. This is the way the Masoretes sounded like when the Masoretes wrote them down. I don’t think anyone has a claim to that or is saying that that’s…
Nehemia: Oh, let’s put it this way. I’ve spoken to people who would go further than that and say, “This is how Moses recited the Book of Numbers.” Which… okay. So, alright, that’s an opinion. So, you basically said it; you’re saying the Masoretes, when they recorded these graphic symbols, they didn’t necessarily perform those symbols the way that they’re performed in any particular synagogue today. That’s what you’re saying.
Nehemia: And I don’t think that’s particularly controversial. So, what were the Masoretes? So, here’s two questions: did the Masoretes make up the… they made up the graphic symbols, but did they make up such a thing as an etnachta? Which is where each verse is, according to the law of continuous dichotomy, divided in half. Or was there something they heard where they said, “Oh, that’s a rest,” which is what etnachta means.
Sophia: So, my understanding, the hypothesis that I’m developing…
Nehemia: Okay, everybody pay attention! We’ve heard this now on multiple episodes. Now you’re hearing it from the woman who has come up with this hypothesis.
Sophia: So, my… and actually this is not something that I’m saying, that the accents, the phenomena, the phonology… I’m calling it the phonology, that…
Nehemia: What do you mean by phonology? Tell us what that means.
Sophia: The sound system.
Nehemia: The sound, okay. The way something sounds.
Sophia: The way something sounds. So, it’s the reading tradition that we have, the Tiberian Hebrew reading tradition, that is encapsulated in the vowel pointings and the accentual system, that that is not something that the Masoretes made up. That is something that was passed down generation after generation. The reading tradition is understood to be from the Second Temple era. So, going back to the Second Temple era, that is the scholarly opinion today.
Nehemia: Okay, hold on. So, I’m going to say something hypothetical here. So, when Jesus was in the synagogue… and you don’t know, you don’t have a time machine, but when Jesus was in the synagogue in Nazareth, and he opened up the scroll of Isaiah and he read, was he reading it, or could he have been reading it… is it plausible to say he was reading it using this accentuation system?
Sophia: Yes, along with the sound system for how to pronounce the word. It came with the pronunciation of the word. That’s a part of the reading tradition, yes.
Nehemia: And so, how did they transmit this from the Second Temple period all the way down to when the Masoretes wrote it down? Which, we don’t really know when that is, but it was written down by the beginning of the 10th century, probably by the 9th century. But maybe they wrote it down before that. How was it transmitted?
Sophia: Orally. You learn how to say this from the people who teach you, the teachers in your communities. It’s passed down. It’s something that you learn. That’s a part of the liturgy in reading the Scriptures.
Nehemia: So, I’m going to ask you if this is a correct way of explaining this. I was once talking to this guy from Italy. I was on this kibbutz, and there was this Jew from Italy there. And every time when he was speaking English, he would say, “That’s so amazing!” And he would say it in this really exaggerated way. I thought at first that he was making fun of me, and then I realized, “You know what? That is how we say that.” He’s exaggerating it because he’s not a native speaker. But we don’t say, “That-is-so-amazing.” Even though… like my grandmother, Ruth Claberson, she used to tell me, “Eh, Nehemiela, enunciate, enunciate!” Because English wasn’t her native language. So, for her, you could say, “That-is-so-amazing,” in theory. But in reality, that’s not how you say it; there’s a certain intonation.
I also noticed this in China. I was at a dentist’s office, and I said, “Is this going to hurt?” And he said, “Yes.” And I’m like, “Wait! Did I hear you right?” No, when you tell someone it’s going to hurt, you say “Yes!” That’s how you say it! And oh, it hurt! He did some treatment without anesthesia. And when I asked for anesthesia, he said, “You can bear it.” Which I could, but I didn’t want to.
Anyway, so the point is, is that what these accents are? Are there certain ways that people express language that we don’t think about because we’re native speakers? Is that what it is?
Sophia: So, yes. So, my hypothesis is that dimension of language is the dimension of language that we call prosodic phonology. So, it’s the…
Nehemia: Let’s put those words up on the screen; prosodic phonology. And those are scary words. They’re scary to scholars, I’ll tell you that; prosodics who aren’t linguists.
Sophia: It’s the features, it’s the sound features that help us to organize our speech and to… And like you said, we don’t speak in this monotone, flat way. Our speech has highs and lows, rises and falls. It has accents. It has phrasing. We group things together. So, we call this post-lexical. It’s above the lexeme.
Nehemia: And what’s a lexeme?
Sophia: A lexeme is the word. So, for languages that are not tonal, that don’t have tonal contrasts, like Mandarin for example, that can distinguish the meaning of two words with a different tone, this is above that. It’s melody that shapes, that comes with the spoken word, that shapes the spoken word. And it’s just a part of how we say it. So, a word, for example, like Chicago, “Chi-cago,” there’s a shape to the word. There’s an accent on the second syllable, “Chi-ca-go,” fall, high, fall. Waterloo, “Water-loo,” that’s a three-syllable word.
Nehemia: Isn’t it “Water-loo?”
Sophia: Okay, “Water-loo.”
Nehemia: I don’t know, maybe I’m mispronouncing it.
Sophia: Well, there you go! This is regional; so where you are from.
Nehemia: And by the way, I say “Chi-ca-go,” and we’re from the same city, and you say “Chi-ca-go.”
Sophia: But that is the dimension of…
Nehemia: Neither of us says “Chi-ca-go,” or “Chi-ca-go,” or “Chi-ca-go.”
Nehemia: Okay, and you call it a shape.
Sophia: There is a melody to high, low, rising, falling. There’s stress; where do we put that melody? And here we’re talking about just a single word, but we could take a sentence and see the different ways that we could shape that sentence. But all of that is above the word itself. When we bring words together, and when the word is said in isolation, again, it’s said with a contour, because that’s how we speak. It’s a dimension of language that is a part of how we speak.
Nehemia: So, I saw this video a while back, and it was this British speech coach in the 50’s or something. And he was explaining to this immigrant, who was a native Tamil speaker, from, I suppose, India or Sri Lanka, I don’t really know. And I’m asking here, really, if this is what we’re talking about. So, he explained that the Tamil speech pattern doesn’t really have emphasis on different words. He gave, “He lives in the house that Jack built.” And he says, “The way a Tamil speaker would speak it is, ‘He-lives-in- the-house-that-Jack-built.’” To us, it almost sounds monotone, but that’s their speech pattern.
And I’ve heard this, by the way, about the former vice president who ran for president. That in the native Tamil language, which her name comes from, it’s actually not “Ka-mala,” or “Kam-a-la,” it’s “Ka-ma-la,” with a slight emphasis on the end. I’m sure I’m mispronouncing it. Meaning, each language has its own language patterns, and the surefire sign that you can identify a foreigner, or a non-native speaker is… I’m speaking Spanish, but I’m using the English intonation patterns, and immediately I can pronounce every word perfectly. But I sound like a foreigner, certainly in Hebrew.
Sophia: That’s absolutely true. It’s the hardest thing. It’s usually one of the last things you learn when you’re learning language, and it’s the first tip off, usually, that you can tell that you’re not a native speaker, or a foreigner in some way, or you’re not from around here.
Nehemia: Well, that’s another interesting thing. Within the United States, we have different prosodic phonologies. Is that the correct way of saying it?
Sophia: We have different… well, that’s…
Nehemia: Like, a Southerner, I don’t think, necessarily sounds like somebody from Chicago. Am I wrong about that?
Sophia: So, for example, the…
Nehemia: With a classic Southern accent.
Sophia: So, in the prosodic phonology literature, we’ll talk about mainstream American English.
Sophia: Or British English. And so, yes, when you’re describing this level of sound, it’s really for a community of speakers, and you would need to study that community of speakers to see what the differences are. What are the qualitative differences between, let’s say, a Southern dialect and a Northern dialect or East Coast dialect or something like that? Are there really contrastive differences? Or, what are those differences, and how would we describe that? And that’s in the theory; that’s deep in the weeds.
Nehemia: Well, I’ll give an example from my family life. So, my wife’s name… and by the way, my wife sends her regards. Her name is Lynel, and her mother calls her “Lin-aiyil”, and her aunt… and this is really interesting. So, her mother’s sister calls her “Lin-ay-il”, and her mother makes fun of her own sister because they grew up in different parts of South Carolina, because there’s an age gap there, and when they’re making fun, in a sense, they’re perceiving the different prosodic phonology and realizing its novelty or it’s difference. So, I think essentially… like when the guy said to me, “It’s so amazing!” He’s not a linguist. He doesn’t know how to put it in linguistic terms, but he’s hearing something, and he’s like, “Why are you saying it that way? That’s not how I say it.” That’s really what it means, making fun of someone.
Sophia: And in terms of how you analyze the stream, how you analyze it, so there’s…
Nehemia: What does stream mean? Stream of what?
Sophia: The stream of speech, the stream of speech.
Sophia: So, one of the difficulties that linguists faced is, what’s the contrastive difference? There’s a phonetic quality and there’s a phonemic quality. And so, what’s really important in terms of the description, in terms of understanding the phonology of the language, is identifying these phonemic differences that…
Nehemia: Can you explain phonemic and phonetic? I think most people don’t know what that is.
Sophia: A phonemic, for example, the difference between “buh” and “duh”, that’s a phonemic difference. So, if I say “bog” and “dog”, I need to understand the B-D distinction to differentiate those two words. Whereas aspiration may not be phonemic, it’s a phonetic.
Nehemia: What is aspiration?
Sophia: When you hear the “hhh-hhh”, when you hear the hhh sound of the breath after a stop, as opposed to no breath, or the difference between “buh” and “vuh” in Hebrew; that’s not a phonemic difference, it’s a phonetic difference.
Nehemia: It can be, if it’s a Vav versus a Bet.
Sophia: Oh, right, right.
Nehemia: If it’s two performances of the letter Bet. So, like we have the word kelev, “dog”, but then “my dog” is “kalbi.” So, it’s a “vuh” in “dog”, but in “my dog” it’s “buh”. So, you’re saying, that is a phonetic difference that doesn’t have a phonemic significance.
Sophia: Right, exactly. What’s important for phonologists is to understand what that contrastive difference is because that’s where the meaning lies. So, I can say… your wife’s family members may say your wife’s name differently, but they all know the word that they’ve said. No one’s confused about what they’re hearing, there’s some phonetic differences.
Nehemia: So, what would be an example where there is a phonemic difference?
Sophia: A phonemic difference?
Nehemia: Yeah, a phonemic difference.
Sophia: So… “bag” “tag”. I have to understand… if my language doesn’t have a difference between the “buh” and the “tuh”, I’m not going to hear that as phonemically different. But if I do, I’m going to hear B-T.
Nehemia: So, famously, this is something with people, particularly from Southeastern China, from Guangdong, where they don’t distinguish between “luh” and “ruh”. And so, the example I remember when I was a kid is, we had this plumber, and he told my mother, “There was lust in the pipes.” Because he can’t hear the difference between “lust” and “rust.” Those aren’t different sounds to him. That’s not everywhere in China, I learned. Where I lived in China, there was no difference between “fuh” and “huh”. So, Hua Mulan, that character in the movie, they called her Fa Mulan. I’m sure I’m doing the tones wrong. I know I am. So, the tones were more important to them than the difference between “fuh” and “huh”, which blows my mind. So, what would be an example where there’s a phonemic difference in regards to prosodic phonology? That’s, I think, what we want to understand.
I understand why the people who are reading the accents generation after generation, and they’re memorizing it… I mean, they’re not reading the accents, they’re reading the Bible. And with every word in that Bible, what’s being transmitted, you’re saying… and this isn’t your opinion. This is a pretty widely accepted thing today among scholars. Geoffrey Khan has a whole school of thought that goes back to Second Temple times. Meaning, sometime in the Second Temple era, they’re learning to recite the whole Bible, or maybe different people did different portions of it, and when they’re saying, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth,” they’re not just pronouncing “Be-re-shit ba-ra El-oh-him,” they’re doing it together with some kind of prosodic phonology, as you call it. Which then the Masoretes decide, “We need to write down not just the vowels, but the prosodic phonology.” Why would that be important? Why would they go through such trouble? And it is a lot of trouble. The accents are a huge amount of trouble.
Wow, so this is amazing stuff, guys. This is one of the most important interviews I’ve ever done. You’ll probably need to listen to it two or three times… I know I will, but this is cutting edge stuff. This is really important. I really appreciate you taking the time and coming on the program to explain this, and you’re explaining really complicated stuff.
Guys, if you’re listening to this and you’re saying, “I have no idea what she’s talking about,” and if you get 10% of what she’s talking about, you are ahead, quite frankly, of most Bible scholars who haven’t even heard it, let alone had a chance to understand it. So, this is really important.
I’m a big believer that we should do our academic work, but we should also try to communicate that to the public, because otherwise, what are we doing it for? Just for ourselves? So, I appreciate you coming on and explaining what you’ve explained and taking the time, and, in a sense, really putting yourself out here. Because some of the things you’re explaining haven’t been published yet because the editors, quite frankly… this is me saying it, not Sophia; quite frankly, maybe some of the editors of the journals don’t understand what you’re talking about because they’re not linguists. And I think of one article that you have that did come out in a linguistic journal. That’s not an accident, because you needed someone on the staff there who is a linguist to really be able to vet this. So, thank you for sharing this.
Sophia: Absolutely. And I have my first linguistics conference actually in May. I’ll be sharing this with prosodic phonologists at a Tone and Intonation Conference.
Sophia: So, yeah, my challenge there will be to describe…
Nehemia: Well, they don’t know Hebrew, so they’ll have no idea if what you’re saying is correct or not.
Sophia: And this medieval orthography, explaining that, so it’s a challenge on both sides, introducing the orthography…
Nehemia: So, what you’re really doing here is interdisciplinary, and that’s the one word, that’s the problem. Everybody in academia says we should do interdisciplinary stuff, but it’s hard.
Sophia: It’s very hard, yes. It’s very hard.
Nehemia: I’ve done some interdisciplinary stuff with X-ray fluorescence, studying inks, and I’ll try to explain it to people in the field, and I need to understand it myself. And it’s a challenge. Well, what questions are the physicists able to even answer? Well, if they can’t answer that question, I need to reformulate the question. So, it’s hard, it is. But I think it’s really important.
Sophia: It’s hard and slow work, but very important work.
Nehemia: Well, thank you so much.
Sophia: Thanks for having me.
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VERSES MENTIONED
Joshua 1:8
Luke 4:17-19
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OTHER LINKS
Moving On from the Law of Continuous Dichotomy | Sophia L Pitcher - Academia.edu
Sophia L Pitcher | University of the Free State - Academia.edu
Towards the Development of an Intonation-Based Prosodic Model for the Masoretic Cantillation Accents of Tiberian Hebrew
by Sophia Lynn Pitcher
The Prosodic Basis of the Tiberian Hebrew System of Accents (1994)
by Bezalel Elan Dresher
https://deafbiblesociety.com
A treatise on the accentuation of the twenty-one so-called prose books of the Old Testament
A treatise on the accentuation of the three so-called poetical books of the O.T. : Psalms, proverbs, and Job
by Wickes, William, 1817?-1903
The post Hebrew Voices #211 – The Taste of Scripture: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.
