I frammenti della Genesi nella seconda colonna esaplare di Origene. Analisi linguistica e fonetica

The study of the extant fragments of the Second Column of Origen’s Hexapla by thoroughly analysing the transcription carried out many centuries before the first Masoretic punctuation, may serve as an important source to know how Hebrew was pronounced in Palestine. An examination of the /a/ sounds is particularly interesting because the Greek graphemes may reveal the exact pronunciation of the vowel, indicating a specific terminus ante or post quem for some Hebrew linguistic and phonetic phenomenona. The same happens with regard to guttural consonants, whose lacking in the Greek language allows us to understand the ways of their transcription in the second column.