SEPHARDIC SCANSION AND PHONOLOGICAL THEORY.(Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain) From: The Journal of the American Oriental Society | Date: April 1, 1999| Author: | COPYRIGHT 1999 American Oriental Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

In the Hebrew poetry of medieval Spain the conjunction u- 'and' is metrically anomalous, scanning sometimes as long and sometimes as short. Malone (1983) argued that, although the behavior of u- is irregular if it is examined in concrete, phonetic terms, it falls in with the general metrical pattern of Sephardic poetry if analyzed at a more abstract level of phonological representation. Malone's treatment of Sephardic Hebrew, along with similarly abstract treatments by several scholars of poetic meter in a variety of other languages, forms part of the case for the psychological reality of ...