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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Yemenite Hebrew

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  • From: Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>
  • To: kwrandolph AT gmail.com
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Yemenite Hebrew
  • Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2010 18:17:01 -0400 (EDT)

On Tue, 2 Nov 2010 13:14:07 -0700, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:
> Will:
>
> On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>wrote:
>
> > …
> > In a different post on this thread, Isaac Fried cited Wikipedia as
> > stating:
> >
> > "It is believed by some scholars that its (Yemeni) phonology was heavily
> > influenced by spoken Yemeni Arabic".
> >
> > This is undoubtably true. Once a language is no longer the mother tongue
> > of those who use it, it cannot help but be heavily influenced by the
> > language(s) they do speak in everyday use. So also, we *must* assume
> > that the Sephardic pronunciation is heavily influenced by Mediterranean
> > (esp. Iberian) Romance languages, and that the Ashkenazic pronunciation
> > is heavily influenced by Eastern European (German/Polish/Lithuanian...)
> > languages.
>
> > Yemenite preserves a fricative pronunciation for non-daghesh daleth,
> > gimel, and taw, whereas both Ashkenazic and Sephardic do not. Why
> > should this be? The immediate answer that suggests itself is that
> > German/Polish/Lithuanian on the one hand and Spanish/Portuguese on the
> > other do not have phonemic distinctions between [d] vs [ð], &c. while
> > Arabic does. (But note that the situation of having Arabic as the
> > host language made possible the preservation of a distinction that
> > would be difficult to maintain when the host language is e.g. Spanish
> > or German.)
> >
>
> It must be remembered that languages not only lose phonemes, but also gain
> them. They gain them through contact with other languages. Southern Arabia
> has traditionally had more extensive contacts with a variety of different
> languages than any other Arabic speaking area, as a result, is it any
> surprise that Yemeni Jews would have the greatest number of phonemes when
> they speak Hebrew?

Quite true, but there are differences in the way natively spoken languages
are influenced by the surrounding languages and purely learned languages.
If Yemeni Hebrew were the mother tongue to a community, I wouldn't be the
least surprised to see it incorporate Arabic phonemes that had not previously
existed in their Hebrew speech (an emphatic interdental, for example). I
think this kind of borrowing is a good deal less likely when the language
community is not actively using the language for everyday communication.
Here the influence is mainly negative - not too negative in the case of
Yemeni consonants, because of the richness of the Arabic consonantal
inventory, but more noticeably in the other traditional pronunciations,
where the distinctions between daghesh and non-daghesh pronunciation of
letters has been eliminated where the host languages do not support such a
distinction.

I'm not familiar with Southern Arabic pronunciation, but Arabic dialects
tend to be poor in vowel phomemic distinctions. If this holds true for
Yemeni Arabic, I wonder how this affects vowel distinctions in Yemeni
Hebrew?

> How many of those phonemes are true phonemes, indicating
> difference in meaning?

I imagine it would hard to find instances of minimal pairs where a daghesh
(lene) and non-daghesh daleth or gimel would produce a difference in
meaning. I don't think this precludes them from considered separate
phonemes, however. The Massoretes certainly heard a difference, or they
wouldn't have bothered with distinguishing them in the first place. Compare
the distinction in English between the voiced and voiceless interdental
fricatives. To my mind, there is no doubt that they are separate phonemes -
they are not conditional variants of each other and they are clearly
indicated by separate pronunciation symbols in dictionaries. But finding
a minimal pair is quite difficult - the only one I've been able to come up
with is "thy" vs "thigh", and I've had to use an archaism to do it!

> >
> > But considering that *all* traditional pronunciations of Hebrew have
> > been subject to the phonologies of the host languages, Yemenite has
> > the advantage that the host language is Arabic, a language closely
> > related to Hebrew, and that the Yemenite community is closer in
> > proximity to the original area where Hebrew was spoken. Which Romance
> > language is closest to Latin? Most people would say Italian, which is
> > unsurprising since Italian is closest to (in fact, encompassing) the
> > original area of Latin speech. To be sure, there are numerous instances
> > where elements of Latin pronunciation or vocabulary are better preserved
> > in other Romance languages, and the same caveats apply to Yemenite Hebrew
> > -
> > we must not assume that Yemenite Hebrew is automatically closer to the
> > "original" Hebrew, no more that Italian is automatically closer to Latin.
> >
>
> Good point.

--
Will Parsons



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