In congregations that daven with Nusach Ashkenaz, the Friday night Maariv is preceded with a recitation of Mishnayos beginning with the words: Bameh madlikin u'vamoh ain madlikin...
I always wondered why the first במה is vowalized with a segol (bameh) while the second one gets a komatz (bamoh). They both seem to mean the same thing, so why do they have a different nikkud?
Answer
The M'leches Shlomo (link) suggests (as does @AvrohomYitzchok in the comments to @H'Gabriel's answer) that it has to do with the following word starting with an "aleph". This would be based on the fact that we find uses of "במה" in Tanach to follow this rule. It seems that this would be a rule specific to the word "במה" and not fall into more general rules that we have for vowelization.
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