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Re: Old Hebrew Emphatics Question

From:Dan Sulani <dnsulani@...>
Date:Monday, December 16, 2002, 16:47
On 15 Dec, Steg Belsky wrote:

On Mon, 18 Nov 2002 15:40:21 +0000 =?iso-8859-1?q?bnathyuw?=
<bnathyuw@...> writes:
> is there any difference in the pronunciation of > emphatics in modern hebrew ? i don't trust the > evidence of the uk jewish friends i've asked as they > tend to be phone deaf and unable to speak more than a > few words > bn
- It seems to depend on what the speaker's native language (or the native language of their semi-recent ancestors) is. Speakers of languages without anything resembling emphatics usually don't distinguish them; speakers of languages with pharyngealized, velarized, or glottalized consonants use those. The Israelis i've heard don't seem to distinguish the emphatics, though, even Israelis that use the pharyngeal consonants /H/ and /3/ (hhet and `ayin). First, let me say that I'm not certain of exactly what you mean by the term "emphatic". If you mean a co-articulation that is reputed to have existed in proto-Semitic ( I recall a book on the development of Hebrew that set up certain proto-Semitic consonants in triads: voiced, voiceless, and "emphatic" [IIRC, "emphatic" involved the raising of a closed glottis; but I don't claim to be a scholar of Semitic linguistics, so if I'm wrong on the terminology, please correct me.] ), then, IME, modern Israeli Hebrew has no such thing. OTOH, if by "emphatic" you are simply referring to pharyngeal or uvular consonants (the definition given in my copy of Crystal's Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics), then that's another story. The spoken Israeli Hebrew that I hear around me has lost many distinctions that are preserved in the orthography. (So much for Hebrew being a "what-you-see-is-what-you- say" lang!). |hhet| and |'ayin| are usually not pronounced as pharyngeals. Israelis coming from Arabic-speaking countries do pronounce them, as do their children if they grow up surrounded by pharyngeal-speakers. If not, they tend not to use them in daily speech. (The conflict between home-dialect and street-dialect can sometimes be very confusing: just this morning I was trying to sort things out for a kid whose parents' native lang uses an apical trill for "r" [and so the Hebrew he hears at home also contains an apical trill], when all around him he hears the velar/uvular trill for "r". The poor kid ended up using [w] for "r"!) Anyhow, for those who do pronounce |hhet| and |'ayin| as pharyngeals, the root of the tongue moves back _horizontally_ towards the pharyngeal wall, whereas for most Israelis, pronouncing |hhet|, the back of the tongue moves _vertically_ towards the velum, pronounced exactly the same as |chaf| (= [x] ). A whole different axis of movement. Most Israelis pronounce |'ayin| exactly as |aleph|, that is: as a soft glottal stop ("soft", because if the glottis gets banged shut too hard too often, nodules can develop on the vocal cords, resulting in chronic hoarseness, and then I am called in to teach a softer version.) While we're on glottals, the glottal fricative, [h], is on its way out among native Hebrew speakers; they have a great tendency to drop the [h], although they still know it's there and will put it in if emphasizing or carefully pronouncing a word. The letter named |quf| may have originally stood for an "emphatic" version of a velar plosive, but today, IME, people who make the distinction between that and |chaf-dagesh| (|chaf| with a dot in it) don't use an "emphatic" coarticulation, but merely distinguish between |quf| as a voiceless velar plosive and |chaf-dagesh| as the voiceless paletovelar (to my ears at least) plosive. Most Israelis don't make the distinction and use the paletovelar point of articulation for both. Finally, as I understand it, proto-Semitic also had "emphatic" interdentals and "emphatic" dentals/alveolars, none of which exist in moden spoken Hebrew. In fact, interdentals of any sort do not show up in modern speech. |tav|, the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, once stood for, AFAIK, an interdental. Today it is pronounced exactly the same as |tet| ( = [t] ). Hope that this helps. Dan Sulani ------------------------------------------------- likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a A word is an awesome thing.

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Muke Tever <mktvr@...>