The gemara says that one should be careful to annunciate each word in kriat shma.

Why Hakanaf P'Til and Eisev Bsadecha? It's a phay followed by a pay and vais followed by a bais, which aren't the same sound.

I saw A Daf A Day discusses it. The answer we gave in shiur this morning was that there are different ways to pronounce vais, and sefardim read it as bais. For example they say Rav Obadia Yosef (the maggid shiur said he knew this to be true among Iranians specifically)

I don't see what the great difficulty is. Nekudot were not invented until well after the Gemara was closed. Anyone reading any Hebrew would have to know specifically how to pronounce words. Presumably a lot of this would be instinctive to the native Hebrew speaker, a lot would be obvious to one familiar with whatever grammatical rules are involved in when letters get a dagesh (to use an anachronism) and when they don't.

In other words, when one picked up a written Shema in Talmudic times it is not a given that he'd know how to differentiate between these beis and veis or fey and pey if he didn't specifically know somehow to do so.

[quoker,

Sounds like a fair explanation.

Of course most Jews then were probably 1) not familiar with Hebrew grammar and 2) not native Hebrew speakers so even the ability to read would not have been much help unless one simply knew how to pronounce it, something that was probably less likely in the time before Hebrew writing came to be dotted.

I thought they didn't use siddurim, rather, they followed the chazzan?

Sure, but presumably there were some liturgical writings in existence anyway. The chazzan may have had something to read from. There definitely were written Tanakhs, and a lot of davening comes from Tanakh. Its seems plausible for many people to be ignorant of pronouncing words that require the clarification of nekudot when they didn't yet exist.

[q

I hear.

Baruch Shekivanti

I haven't read the Artscroll threads here, but based on this gemara, I'm wondering how they chose the stops that they have in their siddur. Al Livavecha doesn't have a stop, rather it has a dash, which makes it look like it goes together.

The words do go together. Care just needs to be taken not to pronounce it as one word.

So why don't they put the stop there? They do it by a lot of other places.

On another thread we were discussing how Ashkenazim and Sephardim pronounce God's name and it was metioned that it's hard to determine how words were pronounced in ancient times if there are limited transliterations. However, R. Ovadyah Yoseph in Yalkut Yoseph (the Kol Torah volume) in Siman 6 has a discussion where he uses this gemara on 15b and other evidence such as rhyming schemes in piyyutim and scribal errors to demonstrate how certain (specifically Sephardi) pronounciations are primordial.

Because be-chol-levavecha is sort of one word. The dash is part of the trop so to speak. They can't put a stop in the middle of two words that are combined and joined with a single trop. There's no independent trop on the first word. Similarly with 'al-levavecha. Just like there's no stop in the middle of a single word like "levavchem" even though a vei"t follows a vei"t.

Trivia: when ka"ph-kama"tz lame"d has its own trop is not connected with the word that follows. Therefore the pronunciation is "Kal 'atzmotay to'marnah" and not "kol 'atzmotay to'marnah" (Tehillim 35:10) in Nishmat.

[quotebarfodibard