Hi Chris, On Tue, 16 Jul 2013 10:57:26 +0100, Chris Watts <[email protected]> wrote: > just a quick interjection here, and not taking sides since it is hard > to follow. But it was said that Karl pronounces vav as a 'w'. Well > I read a long time ago that the yemenite jews were considered to have > a purer pronounciation than the western jews, this was written by an > israeli, unfortunately I really can not remember where I read this. > Anyway they pronounced all their vavs as 'w' and also they made > distinctions between a soft 'gimmel and a hard gimmel (like the > english gerrard for example) and also a they made distinctions > between a hard tav and a soft tav (almost like the 'th' in there). > Now this probably has no bearing on the present discussion, but I > thought perhaps it note worthy of interest. Especially since I do > remember very clearly that odd statement by the Jewish linguist who > wrote the article saying that he considered this to be a 'purer' > pronounciation. I thought that maybe he knew something that would > have been interesting to learn, but he never talked about why he > thought that, pity.
In many respects, I think this is true, but the reasons lie in the linguistic context. Consider the Y. pronunciation of waw as [w] vs. the S. & A. pronunciation as [v]. The Y. pronunciation does preserve an older pronunciation, but the reason isn't simply because Y. is naturally conservative, but because of the linguistic milieu. The host language, Arabic, has [w], so there would be no difficulty in using it in Hebrew also. But in lot of Europe, including Iberia and Central/Eastern Europe, an earlier [w] had developed into [v]. Under these circumstances, it would be natural to adopt the host-language phonemic inventory when pronouncing Hebrew, hence replacing [w] with [v]. What about differences in pronunciation for the BGDKPT letters? Let's see, in most of Europe [ð] doesn't occur, so no distinction between daleth with and without the daghesh, both [d]. In Classical Arabic and some (though not all) modern dialects [ð] does occur, so Y. Hebrew can make the distinction. Likewise for [θ]. In most of continental Europe, [θ] doesn't occur, so [θ] in Hebrew was replaced, by [t] is S., by [s] in A. But in Arabic, [θ] does occur (under the same circumstances as [ð]), so the opposition in Hebrew of [t] vs. [θ] could be maintained. Let's look at gimel. In most of Europe, [ɣ] doesn't occur, so no distinction between Hebrew gimel with or without daghesh, both [g]. But Arabic *has* a [ɣ], so a distinction between gimel with and without the daghesh can be made. Hold on, though. It appears that Y. gimel with daghesh is pronounced [dʒ] rather than [g]. Could this by any chance have something to do with an earlier Arabic [g] developing into [dʒ] in most (although not all) dialects? No problem with beth, kaph, and pe - [v], [x], and [f] are all common in continental European languages. One last thing - the distinction between emphatic and non-emphatics has been eliminated in the European S. & A. pronunciations, but are maintained in Y. Arabic, of course has such distinctions, but European languages do not. (In the case of sadhe, a reasonable substitution with the affricate [ts] could be made.) I think you can see a pattern here - the S., A. & Y. pronunciations are all limited to adapting Hebrew phonology to that of the host language(s). -- ὣς ἔφατο Will Parsons _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
