La seconda colonna esaplare: analisi di criteri fonetici e morfologici di trascrizione

The confrontation between the second column of Origen’s Hexapla (Secunda), in which the Hebrew Old Testament is transcribed in Greek letters, and the Masoretic Text (MT) is very useful in order to reconstruct the evolution of linguistic phenomena of Hebrew language. In its phonetic transcription, Secunda is characterized by phonetic and morphological criteria of rendering. In some circumstances, it is more conservative than the MT: it is the case of nominal - מִ prefix, that is widely transcribed with alpha, as μα-: /a/ is in fact the original vowel, that the Secunda maintains in its transcription, because of the absence of the attenuation law (/a#/> /i/ in MT). The original vowel is also evident in segolate names: they are always monosyllabic in transcription, and the vowel of Secunda is often different from the Masoretic Text’s vowel; in this category, the Secunda reveals the absence of Philippi’s law, that allows the passage í > á. The piel transcription gives us the possibility to observe the phonetic tendency about gemination in the Secunda. In this verbal form, the gemination of the II radical is a modal mark: it seems to be always respected. However, three specific transcriptions could maybe explain with a recurrent Greek consonantal sequence, that is -σσ-. This analysis is important to bear upon the pronunciation of Hebrew language before Masoretic punctuation, and it is essential to understand the tradition of Hebrew language of Secunda, mainly through the comparison with other traditions of Hebrew.