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Re: Hebrew, etc. [was: Multi-lingos

From:Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>
Date:Tuesday, August 22, 2000, 14:36
On Tue, 22 Aug 2000 10:04:26 -0400 callanish <callanish@...>
writes:
> You mentioned something that really interested me, about some > speakers of > Hebrew preserving older pronunciation distinctions (like het vs. > chaf). that > are lost in general Israeli speech. I'd really like to hear more > about that, > if you can tell me. Is it any particular group(s) of people that > keep this > distinction? Are there any other older pronunciations that are also > kept > (e.g. what about tet vs. tav, or vav pronounced /w/)? Do you know > the reasons > why these distinctions were preserved among certain people but not > others?
> Thomas
- Since you sent it to the list and not just to Dan, i'll help out a bit in case he won't get his email for a while. The pharyngeals hhet /H/ and `ayin /3/ are preserved primarily by Mizrahhiyim, Jews from the Middle-East (who are commonly lumped together with the Sefaradim from Iberia and it's diaspora), who also generally preserve the emphatic ttet, tzadi, and quf (with a non-affricated ssadi). I don't know first-hand of any subculture that pronounces vav as /w/ - a good proof that the shift from /w/ to /v/ is very ancient is (at least early CE) that in the Jerusalem Talmud there are 'mispellings' or 'alternate spellings' of words that alternate between bet and vav; also, Syrians, who come from an Arabic (which has /w/) environment, pronounce vav /v/. From what i can remember from the _Encyclopedia Judaica_ article on "Pronounciations of Hebrew" (an amazing resource for this stuff!) the only groups that pronounce vav as /w/ (either always or allophonically) also use a /w/ (or a continuum of /w/ /B/ /b/) for instances of bet. The reasons behind different subcultures preserving different sounds and shifting different sounds are usually based in their linguistic environment - Iberians and Middle-Easterners/North Africans, who come from relatively vowel-poor areas (5 for Spanish, 3/6 for Arabic), merge vowels like /e/ tzeireh and /E/ segol, /O/ qamatz and /a/ patahh, etc. Northern and Eastern Europeans, whose linguistic environments lack emphatic and pharyngeal consonants, merged those with their non-emphatic and velar/glottal counterparts. About his hhet/khaf example, when i was in Israel i met a girl who *insisted*, forcefully, that no one is allowed to call her anything besides /Hofit/, with a pharyngeal hhet. No /xofit/, no /hofit/. Only /Hofit/. Although Ashkenazim (North/East European) tend to preserve more vowel distinctions, the actual quality of the vowels are very varied across Greater Ashkenaz, for instance the word /bOr@ku/, which in Israeli Modern Standard is /barxu/, is pronounced /bOrxu/ by North-Eastern Ashkenazim and /burxi/ by Galitzianer (South-Eastern?) Ashkenazim. According the the EJ article, the Yemenite Accent, which is commonly considered the "most authentic" pronounciation, is actually 5 different pronounciations used by different regions in Yemen! And then of course, there's the "Steghian Accent" as someone called it here, which sounds Ashkenazic to most Sefardim, and Sefardic to most Ashkenazim, and only Judaic Studies professors from Cornell can figure out what's really going on :-) . -Stephen (Steg) "[qol m@vas'ser m@vas'ser v@?o'mer] - [ke@l m@'vas@r m@'vas@r v@'ejm@r]!"