diaeresis
Trevor & Julie Peterson
06peterson at cua.edu
Thu Oct 31 20:53:27 EST 2002
> HSAIAS becomes H SA I AS or HS A I AS based on the
> rule of diaeresis. What determined that this name was
> 4 syllables and not 3. I've always heard it said in
> just 3 syllables where I come from.
The name in Hebrew is yesha'yahu, or just yesha'ya. (I'm using ' to
represent the gutteral 'ayin, which is a consonant that would have been
pronounced way in the back of the throat but is often not pronounced at all
in modern speech.) Hellenistic Greek has no direct equivalent to the
consonantal English y (Hebrew yod), but the sound can be mimicked by
combining I with a following vowel. (You can hear it when you pronounce
Greek quickly. IOTA comes out sounding almost like Yoda.) The diaeresis
prevents AI from being pronounced as a diphthong, so you get the /a/ before
the 'ayin (represented by a brief glottal stop between A and I) and then the
next syllable IAS as an approximation of /yas/. (The S is commonly added to
the ends of proper nouns when they're brought over from other languages into
Greek.)
Generally speaking, I wouldn't take English as the starting point for
pronunciation of biblical names, especially those that originate in Hebrew
:-)
Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics
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