Tiberian Hebrew

Tiberian Hebrew is the canonical pronunciation of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) committed to writing by Masoretic scholars living in the Jewish community of Tiberias in ancient Galilee under the Abbasid Caliphate. They wrote in the form of Tiberian vocalization, which employed diacritics added to the Hebrew letters: vowel signs and consonant diacritics (nequdot) and the so-called accents (two related systems of cantillation signs or "te'amim"). These together with the marginal notes masora magna and masora parva make up the Tiberian apparatus.
Though the written vowels and accents came into use in around 750 CE, the oral tradition that they reflect is many centuries older, with ancient roots.
Sources.
Today's Hebrew grammar books do not teach the Tiberian Hebrew that was described by the early grammarians. The prevailing view is that of David Qimchi's system of dividing the graphic signs into "short" and "long" vowels. The values assigned to the Tiberian vowel signs reveals a Sephardi tradition of pronunciation (the dual quality of qames () as , ; the pronunciation of simple "sheva" () as ).
The phonology of Tiberian Hebrew can be gleaned from the collation of various sources:
Phonology.
Consonants.
Tiberian Hebrew has 29 consonantal phonemes, represented by 22 letters. The sin dot distinguishes between the two values of , with a dot on the left () being pronounced the same as the letter Samekh. The letters (begadkefat) had two values each: plosive and fricative.
The following are the most salient characteristics of the Tiberian Hebrew consonantal pronunciation:
Vowels.
The vowel qualities have phonemic status: (Lev. 5:19) and 'guilty', 'when' and 'mother'. has phonemic value in final stressed position , but in other positions, it may reflect loss of the opposition : . By the Tiberian period, all short vowels in stressed syllables had lengthened, making vowel length allophonic. Vowels in open or stressed syllables had allophonic length (such as in , which was previously short).
The Tiberian tradition possesses three reduced (ultrashort, "hatuf") vowels of which has questionable phonemicity. , under a non-guttural letter, was pronounced as an ultrashort copy of the following vowel before a guttural ( ) and as preceding , ( ). However, it was always pronounced as under gutturals: .
Stress.
Tiberian Hebrew has phonemic stress ( 'they built' vs. 'in us'). Stress is most commonly ultimate, less commonly penultimate, and rarely antepenultimate stress: 'into the tent'.
Phonotactics.
As described above, vowel length is dependent on syllable structure. Open syllables must take long or ultrashort vowels; stressed closed syllables take long vowels; unstressed closed syllables take short vowels. Traditional Hebrew philology considers ultrashort vowels not to be syllable nuclei.
Orthography.
The simple "sheva" sign changes its pronunciation depending on its position in the word (mobile/vocal or quiescent/zero) and its proximity to certain consonants.
In these examples, it has been preferred to show one in the Bible and represents each phenomenon in a graphic manner (a chateph vowel), but the rules still apply when there is only a simple "sheva" (depending on the manuscript or edition used).
When the simple "sheva" appears in any of the following positions, it is regarded as mobile (na):
The gutturals (), and yodh (), affect the pronunciation of the "sheva" preceding them. The allophones of the phoneme follow these two rules:
It must be said that even though there are no special signs apart to denote the full range of furtive vowels, the remaining four () are represented by simple "sheva" (ḥaṭaf ḥiriq () in the Aleppo Codex is a scribal oddity and certainly not regular in Hebrew manuscripts with Tiberian vocalization).
All other cases should be treated as zero vowel (quiescent, nah), including the double final "sheva" (double initial "sheva" does not exist in this Hebrew dialect), and the "sheva" in the words and , read by the Tiberian Masoretes as and respectively. This last case has similarities with phenomena occurring in the Samaritan pronunciation and the Phoenician language.
Depending on the school of pronunciation (and relying on musical grounds, perhaps), the metheg sign served to change some closed syllables into open ones, and therefore, changing the vowel from short to long, and the quiescent "sheva", into a mobile one.
That is referenced specifically by medieval grammarians:
The names of the vowel diacritics are iconic and show some variation: