Hissing, Gnashing, Piercing, Cracking: Naming Vowels in Medieval Hebrew
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Hebrew scholars have long sought comprehensive explanations
for the names of the Tiberian vowels, which are known today
mainly as qameṣ/qamaṣ (/ɔ/), pataḥ (/a/), segol (/ɛ/), ṣere (/e/),
ḥireq/ḥiriq (/i/), ḥolem (/o/), and shureq/shuruq/qibbuṣ/qubbuṣ
(/u/). Aron Dotan offered a brief treatment of these names, as
well as others applied to the Tiberian vowels, in his encyclopaedia article on ‘Masorah’ (Dotan 2007, 634, §5.3.1.3), but his brevity results in a discomforting amount of speculation and generalisation. Before Dotan, Israel Yeivin summarised the usage of Tiberian vowel names in the terminology section of his Introduction
to the Tiberian Masorah (Yeivin 1983, 81–114), but this section is
only a reference list of the names’ occurrences in the Masora. Well
before Yeivin, Paul Haupt wrote a short paper titled ‘The Names
of the Hebrew Vowels’, in which he theorised a number of explanations for the names based on their lexical definitions in comparison to Arabic (Haupt 1901). Haupt’s paper was likewise not
the first attempt to explain the vowel names, and even Gesenius remarks on them in his Lehrgebäude der hebräischen Sprache
(1817, §9 I).