Friday Night Cholent Archive
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10-17-08
... ki mocheil ve'soleiach ata. Barukh ata ...
These two atas are not the same. The first is Ata (stress on the first syllable), the second aTA (stress on the second). What's the reason?
Stress often shifts from its normal last-syllable position when the word sits at a major pause, such as at the end of a sentence. The first one is like that. The second one isn't. You will notice that the vowels are different too, which is part of the same change here: Ata features two kamatz vowels, while aTA is a patach and then a kamatz. If you pronounce these vowels differently, you need to make that clear as well (as "Otoh" and "aTOH").
And while we're talking about these vowels, let's make another mispronunciation clear: all of you who refer to your morah de'atra or, more likely, morah de'asra, as your rov need to check out the vowel here: it's a patach, not a kamatz. The latter vowel is pronounced as something close to 'o' by many Ashkenazim, though not always consistently. In this case, many folks apply that pronunciation in rav where it doesn't belong, since everyone, Ashkenazim and Sefardim alike, pronounce a patach as "ah." Hence, you should refer to your "Rav" no matter how Litvish you or he is; he is not a "Rov."
October 10, 2008
Just in time for Sukkot and Hallel (but not in time for Yom Kippur and all those Al Chets) is this frequent miscue:
milifnei adon chuli aretz milifnei eloHA yaakov.
That penultimate word should be eLOahh, where the second syllable is accented and the last letter is a mapik heh--preceded by a vowel.
(Thus in Al Chet, extra points to those of you who said Ve'al kulam eLOahh selichot....)
Two issues to discuss here, and neither one is which syllable gets the accent (though that is part of the mistake).
1. A mapik heh is a heh with a dot in it. A mapik is not the same thing as a dagesh (a regular dot in a letter); it gives the heh the sound of the letter itself, that is, as a consonant, whereas normally when a words ends in heh the letter is silent. A mapik heh gives a hard h sound, hence eloahh with two h's. It normally means the possessive "her," as in ishahh (her man/husband), or the object "her," as in bahh (in her/it).
2. The more important thing here is that the vowel precedes, not follows, the heh. This is called a patach ganuv and is well known from its use in common words such as ruach, luach, Noach, and so forth. Patach ganuv means "stolen patach" (the name of the horizontal line vowel that goes "ah") and is so called because it steals its place before rather than after the letter under which it appears. We are familiar with this when it occurs under a chet, but heh, like chet, is a guttural (gronit) letter and the rule applies here as well. We just don't see it with a heh very often. (It also applies to the guttural letter/sound ayin in words like shavua, but if you don't pronounce ayin as a consonant, as most of us do not, the point is moot.)
The Koren siddur/machzor/chumash makes this clear by placing the patach ganuv not under the heh or chet but in the space between and below the last two letters of the words, not under the last letter.
October 3, 2008
Last week we again discussed the vav that can change time. The rule has plenty of applications, but it gets more confusing when compared with the familiar vav meaning "and."
Here's an example: in Aleinu, it should not be veyekablu khulam et ol malkhutekha. Rather, vikablu (long v sound) ... not vayekablu, not ve'kablu or anything else but vikablu.
What happened to our nice ve prefix meaning "and"? It turns out that Hebrew doesn't allow a word to begin with two shva vowels in a row. When this might happen, several changes may be enforced depending on the main word that follows the prefix. Before letters vet, mem, and phay, the ve changes to u. That change isn't going to be mispronounced (except by Torah readers, perhaps). But if the first letter after the vav is a yud, then we change ve to vi and erase the vowel under the yud.
There are many examples of this rule. Next week we'll get off the vav kick and (just in time for Sukkot) look at an excruciatingly common mispronunciation in Hallel.
Last week we discussed the rule of vav hahipukh (sometimes called conversive vav), which changes the tense of a verb from past to future or from future to past. We saw that when we go from past to future, the syllable that gets the accent moves as well.
A great example comes in Birkat Hamazon, but it's just a bit more complicated. We say, in the third paragraph, kakatuv, ve'akhalta vesavata uverakhta ("as it is written [in Devarim 8:10], 'You shall eat, and be satisfied, and bless...'").
A number of things are going on here. First, we have three examples of vav hahipukh. This means that what would otherwise be past tense verbs become future verbs (or imperatives/commands, since they refer to what you should do in the future). So far so good.
Therefore, the stress must shift as well to the final syllable: ve'akhalTA ... uverakhTA.
Next, it is important to notice how our standard singing version gets this all wrong. (It was shocking for me too.)
But the trick here is that the middle verb is actually accented on the next-to-last syllable, the same syllable that is accented in the past tense version: vesaVAta.
Why is that? Didn't we just say that the accented syllable changes as part of the rule?
Not so fast. If you look at the original verse, you will see that vesaVAta appears with the note called etnachta¸ which represents a pause in the verse. And that etnachta falls right under the third syllable, not the final one. This is because in most cases, a pause (with this note or with the sof pasuk at the end of any verse) will cause its own shift in accent.
So here we say to our rule of vav hahipukh, essentially, never mind.
Still, you should be vigilant in looking for this rule in your davening, because in non-pause situations (which is most of the time), the accent indeed shifts, and the meaning changes if you get it wrong.
Here are some signs of what to look for.
1. The Siddur or Machzor quotes a verse from Tanakh. (No surprise, since we are discussing a rule of biblical Hebrew.)
2. A verb begins with vav and a shva vowel (a pair of vertically space dots, pronounced ve), and is either a command or a reference to future action. (There are some other possibilities here -- as in vahavioTIM and utehi --but this is the most common. We'll get to why this can vary next week, g.w.)
Thus, in your Selichot and throughout the Yamim Noraim, be careful to say, for example, vesalachTA ("and pardon": referring to what we hope is future forgiveness) or vezakharTI et briti ("and I will remember my covenant").
September 19, 2008:
This week's mispronunciation: Ve'aHAVta eit (eis) adonai elohekha bekhol ... [first paragraph of Shema].
Very common. Very wrong.
It should be Ve'ahavTA eit (eis) ....
What difference does a little stress make? A lot. (You knew that already.)
Biblical Hebrew frequently exercises a rule known as vav hahipukh, sometimes translated as "conversive vav": the vav prefix converts a future tense verb to past tense, or a past tense verb to the future. For an easy example, let's look at the first verse in the Torah that uses this rule.
Vayomer Elohim: "Yehi or!" Vayhi or. [And Elohim said: "Let there be light!" And there was light.]
The first word, Vayomer, is a perfectly typical example, but let's look instead at yehi and vayhi, because here it's quite clear. If yehi means "Let there be," then how does vayhi mean "and there was"? Isn't all that's added here the prefix meaning "and"?
This is where our rule kicks in. Va isn't exactly "and." Attached to a future tense verb (or quasi-future, as in "Let there be"), va changes the verb's tense to past.
So how does this apply to Ve'ahavTA?
In this example, we are going from past to future, unlike with vayhi. In making the trip from past to future, there are two main differences in the rule: we use ve instead of va (with some exceptions, never mind right now) and we change the stress from the syllable of the second letter of the three-letter root (heh in this case) to the last syllable. The past tense verb is correctly pronounced aHAVta. Thus if you say in Shema Ve'aHAVta, you are actually attaching the common "and" prefix ve to a past tense verb, and instead of saying "And you shall love the Lord your G-d" you end up with "And you loved the Lord your G-d."
It's no longer a commandment; it's more like a bad Country & Western verse.
September 12, 2008: barukh hu eloheinu shebaranu likhvodo (as in Uva leTziyon).
If this is how you say it, you owe G-d an apology (not that you didn't already). It should be barukh hu eloheinu shebera'anu likhvodo: the first rendering means, "Blessed is He, our G-d, whom we created for his glory," instead of "who created us for his glory." A common mispronunciation, I am sure, but a major davening faux pas nonetheless.