#Psalmtweet, #SimHebrew Pronunciation

 I was looking at the prior post, on Psalm 66:20, the psalm tweet for the 66th day of the current sequence of 150 psalms, and it struck me how many lessons in pronunciation there are in the text and music. So I have dashed off this extra post.

First, I appreciate the assurance that God has not put aside my prayer or his mercy as these words are 'glossed in translation' here. I take my wife's phrase that she made up over supper last night, a nice touch.

But looking at the phrase - how does one read the left to right SimHebrew, given the automated parsing next to it and the 'official' vowels above it in right to left order? And could this become automatic -- without reading the vowels -- as it is for Hebrew speakers reading a newspaper?

בָּר֥וּךְ אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֲשֶׁ֥ר לֹֽא־הֵסִ֘יר תְּפִלָּתִ֥י וְ֝חַסְדּ֗וֹ מֵאִתִּֽי		20 Blessed be God, who has not put aside my prayer and his mercy from me.
c bruç alohim awr la-hsir tpilti vksdo maiti	5 14	brvc alh\im awr la h/sr t/pl\ti v/ksd\v m/at\i

• bruç - bet - resh - vav - caf -- to spell out the first. 
• br is two consecutive consonants. The vowel between them is an 'ah', but one doesn't really emphasize it - so it is more of a schwa than an 'ah'. When there are two consecutive consonants, that is a possible sound. 
• rv is also two consecutive consonants, but vav is special and may sound like u o or v depending on its context. Here it is 'u'. 
• The caf is a hard c. It is often transcribed as 'k' but in SimHebrew k is the hard 'h' (chet). (Full mapping here.)
• alohim - Lets take this as read - Elohim is the typical spelling in 'English'. The 'o' is not in the square text, but is carried by the lamed ('l').
• awr - asher, 
• The aleph carries a short 'a' sound with a glottal, 
• w is typically sh, 
• the shin (w) carries a short 'e'.
• la-hsir - 
• here one needs to recognize the negative 'la' always pronounced 'lo'. The aleph carries the 'o' in this case without a glottal. 
• The lamed carries a schwa - not pronounced. It needs the aleph to complete the syllable.
• The he carries a short 'e', 
• The samech carries an 'i' - pronounced 'ee'.
• tpilti - haha - here the schwa carried by the taf is pronounced because it is needed for the first open syllable. 
• pi is pronounced with a short 'i' as expected, 
• and there is a full 'ah' between the peh and the lamed. It gets full value as a long 'a' even though it is not the stressed syllable. (You can tell the stress by the accent - and by the music also.) 
• The final yod is the first person singular pronoun suffix.
• vksdo - 
• Here the v at the beginning is pronounced v, 
• k, as part of ks the consonants chet-samech, carries a short 'a', 
• and the vav at the end is pronounced 'o', the third person singular pronoun suffix. 
• maiti - Note that this 5 letter transcription has only 4 corresponding letters in the 'defective' square text, but five in a modern Hebrew full text. 
• The root is 'at', the direct object marker that is most of the time lost and not 'glossed' in translation. See the aleph-taf in the text of the fourth quadrant. 
• The vowels fit into this word a little unexpectedly: The vowel pattern from the concordance for this word shows: _eiֽ_i_i֔_. 
• The mem is a preposition, 
• Again, ma is a pair of consecutive consonants, so there is a little glottal stop between them (since a and y are glottal sometimes). 
• There is a tsere .. an 'ei' vowel below the m and the aleph carries an 'i'. 
• The taf carries an 'i' also and there is a final yod indicating the first person singular pronoun suffix.

Now read it again: bruç alohim // awr la-hsir tpilti vksdo maiti

And sing it.

Blessed be God,
who has not put aside my prayer and his mercy from me.