*This page was migrated in July 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net.
23 July 2022 - 28 July 2022
qamats is a vowel marking in Hebrew that corresponds, roughly, to the English "a" as in "father".
An exception to this is when a qamats occurs in a closed unstressed syllable. In that case, it is known as qamats qatan, and pronounced the like the "o" in "boat".
Another exception is the hataf qamats, which is pronounced as the "o" in boat as well.
These are descriptions of the sort of pronunciation one would find today in an academic setting, influenced by Sephardi or Israeli pronunciation. I do not intend to say how qamats was originally pronounced.
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