히브리어 모음에 대한 고찰 - 티베리아 모음체계를 중심으로

Hebrew Vowels - Tiberian System -

&nbsp;&nbsp;Hebrew is a semitic language which originally consists of consonantal characters only. Some of the consonantal characters were used to express certain vowel sounds already during the biblical period and their use as vowels increased later during the post-biblical period. Nevertheless, the use was not consistent and one consonantal character could express different vowel sounds, therefore, there were still some problems in reading Hebrew texts. When Hebrew ceased to be used as a spoken language of the Jewish people around 200 A.D., some devices were demanded in order to preserve the reading tradition of the Jewish holy texts. Tiberian vowel system is one of the vowel systems made in that background.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;This system was completed around 7-8 century A.D. in the city of Tiberia by Jewish scholars. It was not only adopted in the BHS(= Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia) edition of the Bible widely used today, but is still used in Modern Hebrew. Yet, the understanding of the Tiberian vowel system has not been simple, mainly surrounding the question of length of the vowels, and many scholars have worked on the nature of the system. According to the traditional understanding of the system, there existed differences of length in the Tiberian vowel signs, e.g., pata？ for /a/ but qama？ for /？/. But the new researches introduced in this paper show that there were no such differences of length, rather each sign had its unique timbre and there were seven (or eight if ？va is included) vowel phonemes during the period when the Tiberian system was established. Today the Tiberian system used in modern Hebrew has five phonemes only and the reduction of the number of phonemes reflects the developments of the Hebrew vowels in different Jewish communities until before modern Hebrew was recognized as an official language in 1922.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Many of the biblical grammars for beginners used these days rely on the old versions of the grammar of Gesenius which follows the traditional understanding of the Tiberian vowel system and thereby distinguishes the vowel signs according to length. The situation in Korea is not an exception, as the new researches almost have not been introduced to the Hebrew learners. I hope this paper will be able to be a help to them in new understanding of Hebrew vowels and learning their pronunciations.