Re: The status of the glottal stop in Hebrew

Just my two kopecks about alefs.
From my experience, _all_ alefs are silent if it is the Modern Hebrew
spoken by a russophone Jew. But even the same person starts pronouncing
them as glottal stops while reading from a Hhumash or a Torah scroll in
proper places, that is AT THE BEGINNING OF A SYLLABLE. In other places
they were silent at least as early as in times of Masorets.
P.S. It was a surrealistic experience when two weeks ago in a local
synagogue I heard a guest reciter (baal-kore) who read the scroll with a
distinct Mizrahhi pronunciation, that included pronouncing ALL `AYINS as
something incredibly guttural!!! That was fascinating!

-- Yitzik