Talk:Shva

Liquid at the end of consonant clusters
That the final letter of the consonant cluster in those examples is a liquid is probably a coincidence, e.g. התקטנטן , התכחלחל , השתפנפן. Generally these forms have no standardized form and little research exists in the field (although התקטנטן, for one, appears in a literary publication from 1939). Dan ☺ 20:17, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Shva-Na-Naḥ, or Shva what?
So, how many different ways can we transliterate the second (distinguishing) part of the terms for ?
 * 1) the resting Shva and
 * 2) the mobile Shva

And can we please make up our minds? Are we trying to confuse the reader who's not already familiar with Hebrew terminology, transliteration, and pilpul?

We have here four different English transliterations for two Hebrew words (six if you count ' vs ‘ and the accidental nacḥ), and that's ignoring capitalization. I don't know what to prefer, so I'm deferring this to WikiProject Israel with a comment on the Talk page,.

Section by section, we have:

Introduction
naḥ / naʿ / na' (Somebody ignored, forgot, or didn't know about the difference between the straight ASCII apostrophe and the opening curly single quote.)
 * the resting Shva ( / ), such as in the words (II Sam. 16:5) and  (Josh. 7:1); the mobile Shva ( / ), such as the Shva which appears at the beginning of words, which renders the vowel a mobile vowel, as in the Hebrew word "floating" (meraḥef / ), or as in  (lefanai) or  (shemaʿ) (Deut. 6:4)

Nach / Na
 * e.g. the (first) Shva in the word  (trans. "books of the Law") while it is correctly pronounced in Modern Hebrew, the "פ" (or "f"-sound) being mute, the Shva ', or mobile Shva in  ("time") in Modern Hebrew is often  pronounced as a mute Shva''.

Nach / na' (Here we mix the first two pairs and again use a straight ASCII apostrophe.)
 * transliterating modern Hebrew Shva with ə or ' is misleading, since it is never actually pronounced  – the vowel  does not exist in modern Hebrew – moreover, the vowel  is probably not characteristic of earlier pronunciations either (see Tiberian vocalization → Mobile Shwa = Shwa ).

Pronunciation in modern Hebrew
nacḥ / na ''(with a blunderous mixing of "naḥ" and "nach")
 * In Modern Hebrew, shva is either pronounced /e/ or is mute (Ø), regardless of its traditional classification as shva  or shva 

Shva
In most cases, traditional Hebrew grammar considers shva, or the mobile shva, to be an entity that supersedes a vowel that exists in the basic form of a word but not after this word underwent inflection or declension. Additionally, any shva marked under an initial letter is classified shva na.

Shva

 * Traditional Hebrew grammar defines shva, or shva quiescens, as indicating the absence of a vowel.

(The rest of the story)
It's shva  all the way, no mention of shva .

Shva Ga’ya function discrepancy
The last sentence of the “Shva Ga’ya” section states that this “strict application” of Shva Ga’ya is found in Yemenite Hebrew. However, Yemenite Hebrew applies the rule to any Shva before a gutteral letter, regardless of whether the Shva is written with a Ga’ya or not. Eiteher this sentence or the page of Yemenite Hebrew must be disproven and edited. QwertyCTRL. (talk) 01:52, 11 March 2024 (UTC)