How to explain the syllables of וידבר?

Question

It seems that "וַיְדַבֵּר" is pronounced va-yi-da-ber though I can't understand why the first shva is a shva na as opposed to a svha nach. Why isn't the word pronounced vay-da-ber? The mesora in Shemot 6:2, for example, does not include a meteg beside the patach under the vav, which is what I expected to find.

Answer 1

For the sake of clarity let's first recap a basic rule of shva:

When shva comes at the end of a word, it will always be shva nach, whereas the shva at the start of a word will always be shva na.

Now, in the middle of a word, the rule gets a little more tricky, and requires some backtracking. Our investigation begins by placing the word in its elementary form. For verbs this is the singular form, in the specific tense the original verb was. So, in your specific case we remove the 'Ve', keeping'Yedaber' ('He will speak').

Now stripped, we can see that the original word has a Segol under the , indicating a full 'eh' sound. This indicates that the original word with it's 'Va' prefix 'VaYedaber' is supposed to be pronounced with a slight 'eh' sound. This slight 'eh', slight due to its being jammed between two more pronounced 'ah' sounds, is indicated with a Shva Na.

Another way to look at this is to consider that the 'Va' in 'Vayedaber' is merely a prefix, and therefore the 'yud' is, for all intents and purposes, at the start of the word. This brings us back to the key rule of shva I delineated at the beginning.