Re: Old Hebrew Emphatics Question

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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