Re: Semitic rhotic questions

Paul Bennett scripsit:

> Anyone else got any information to back up either /4/ or /G/~/R/ for
> ancient Hebrew? Steg? Dan? Anyone?
The scholarly consensus, though not unbroken, is that [r] (not [4]) was
the ancient pronunciation of resh, and that the prevalence of [R] in
Israel today reflects the modern Ashkenazic pron. of Hebrew, which reflects
Yiddish and Northern German.

It's true that resh in some ways resembles the true gutturals, but there
are differences: e.g. it does not take schwa mobile.  The argument for
[r] rather than [4] seems to be that resh does not geminate; [4] naturally
geminates as [r] but it would be hard to distinguish between [r] and a
geminated [rr]: a trill is a trill.

Further details at http://www.shamash.org/listarchives/heblang/000726
(search for the phrase "Resh in modern Hebrew", or skip about half-way down).

--
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