Elementary, my Dear Watson, Learning the Alphabet and the Music of Biblical Poetry

 Are you ready for another verse? I was going to do this one, but then I thought better of it.

Who am I?

Do you recognize it? Hint, it's chapter 1 verse 1 of something and the Hebrew name for the something is in the second word.

Instead of the above, I thought I would repeat the poem I put into my letters to my children. 

First, take a few minutes to learn the alphabet a b g d h v z, k 't i c l m n s y, p x q r w t. The quick summary below will do it. (These spellings are from the Unicode site.)

Letter	Name	Sounds Like	Letter	Name	Sounds Like
a	Aleph	Carries a vowel or is silent	l	Lamed	l
b	Bet	b or v	m	Mem	m
g	Gimel	g	n	Nun	n
d	Dalet	d	s	Samech	s
h	He	h	y	Ayin	Carries a vowel
v	Vav	v - vav is interpreted as o, u where needed	p	Pe	p or f (final p)
z	Zayin	z	x	Tsadi	ts
k	Het	ch as in loch	q	Qof	q
't	Tet	t	r	Resh	r
i	Yod	i or y (ii sounds like yi)	w	Shin (Sin)	Mostly sh sometimes s
c, ç	Kaf	hard c ç for final c	t	Taf	t

What! An alphabet with only 22 letters and some of them seem redundant! What's missing? /e/ is not used, and /j/, /o/ and /u/ appear but are not listed above except under /v/, and /f/ is listed under /p/. That reconciles as follows: 22 less 1 (for the doubled and escaped 't - tet) plus 5 = 26.

Sing column 2 to the English alphabet song. It works. You have to make up an ending. (I did sing it at one point for a Sunday School class about 15 years ago - but the server that held it is no more.)

These are the very few differences to English pronunciation: 

• k (het) is a harsher aspirate than h (he).
• the gutturals a and y take vowels that have to be learned for the given words - like ab - father - is an ah sound, but abn - stone - is an eh sound. Sometimes the vowel is explicit.
• aleph, ayin, he, and het - as the final letter of a word - will usually have a furtive /a/ sound before the aspirate, if any.
• x (tsade) is ts.
• i by itself (like y in English) is sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant. The double ii is pronounced yi. The yod can carry a vowel, so him, the sea, is two syllables ha + yam.
• c is always hard even before a schwa.

Here's the poem in SimHebrew preceded by a formal transcription. The task is to derive the rules and exceptions to be 'memorized' for the pronunciation of the more compact SimHebrew.

yose shamaiim va’arets ’et-haiiam və’et-col-’asher-bam hashomer ’emet ləyolam yose mishpat layashuqim noten lekem larəyevim ihvh mattir ’asurim ihvh poqeak yivrim ihvh zoqef cəfufim ihvh ’ohev tsaddiqim ihvh shomer ’et-gerim iatom və’almana iəyoded vəderec rəshayim iəyavvet	yowh wmiim varx at-him vat-cl-awr-bm hwomr amt lyolm yowh mwp't lywuqim notn lkm lrybim ihvh mtir asurim ihvh poqk yivvrim ihvh zoqf cpupim ihvh aohb xdiqim ihvh womr at-grim itom valmnh iyodd vdrç rwyim iyvvt
A formal transcription of Psalms 146:6ff The raised comma is aleph, the raised /y/ is ayin.	The SimHebrew for the same passage. Note the compactness and derive the rules.

Here's the music with my usual informal transcription. Notice how every verse begins with a leap of a sixth. I have set this in the major key. It is a celebratory psalm. Sing it with free flexibility to the pulse of the accents. Notice where each word is accented - it is either the first word in the bar - so for instance lkm is stressed on the first syllable, or the ornament shows the verbal stress. (Nothing whatsoever to do with punctuation.) 

Yesterday I noted that each word must have at least one accent. Note in the music that vat-cl-awr-bm is a single word composed of separate words connected by hyphens. This 'word' has a single stressed syllable. The accents give you the clues as to which syllables define the pulse of the music. Do not sing the syllables woodenly as if the note value was constant. Everything is recitative and moves from pulse to pulse in the musical line until there is a rest point. It's a human pulse - not mechanical.

Psalms 146 beginning at verse 6.

The musical line, the rests, and the sense of the words tell you all you need to know about so-called disjunctive and conjunctive accents. These unmusical names and the law of continuous dichotomy should be utterly purged from your vocabulary. 

If you do the work required by these posts, you will be well on your way to reading SimHebrew. You are at the beginning of a delightful journey.

alh hdbrim awr dibr mwh al-cl-iwral bybr hirdn 

bmdbr byrbh mol suf bin-parn ubin-topl vlbn vkxrot vdi zhb

These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel across the Jordan,

in the wilderness, in the steppe, in the forefront of Suf, between Paran and Tophel and Laban and Hazerot and Di Zahab.

You can find the square text in lots of places on the web so I haven't included it in this post except in the automated transcriptions of the music.