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

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  • From: Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>
  • To: fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Yemenite Hebrew
  • Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2010 18:14:28 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 07:04:18 +0100, "Arnaud Fournet"
<fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>
> From: "Will Parsons" <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>
>
> > ***
> >
> > The elimination can also just be an internal "spontaneous" change.
> > A.
> > ***
>
> Sure it's possible. Let's see. Non-daghes daleth is pronounced [d] in
> Ashkenazic. German, Polish, Lithuanian, Russian &c. have no phoneme [ð].
> Yememite Hebrew has [ð] for non-daghesh daleth. Arabic had/has a phoneme
> [ð]. It *could* be coincidence...
>
> ***
> yes there are plenty of coincidences. French is the only Romance language
> with ö and ü, next to a Germanic language with ö and ü, and next to a Uralic
> language with ö and ü. I don't think this is anything but a chance
> coincidence.
> A
> ***

Other people would disagree with you. But regardless of whether it is or
isn't, this is not a similar situation to the pronunciation of Hebrew in
the various traditions, where we are not dealing with the spoken language
of a minority immigrant population, but how a purely learned language is
pronounced. Since the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, Iberia, and
Southern Arabia were speaking the languages of the lands they lived in
(albeit sometimes highly Hebraized, as in the case of Yiddish), maintaining
a phonemic system at odds with their spoken language would be quite
difficult. Consider the following (partial) parallels:

1) The vocalic "r" sound in Sanskrit was, based both on its origin and how
it is treated alphabetically, undoubtably a vocalic [r] sound. Modern
Indian language speakers replace it with [ri], the obvious reason being
that the modern Indian languages in general do not have vocalic [r], so
it is replaced by something supported by the host language.

2) In Classical times, when Latin was heavily influenced by Greek culture,
Latin speakers thought it necessary to introduce several letters (Y, Z)
and several digraphs (CH, PH, TH) to represent various Greek sounds not
found in Latin. No doubt, educated speakers (who were bilingual in
Greek) pronounced them as in Greek, but as time went on and the Western
Roman empire lost real contact with the Greek speaking world (and hence
with actual Greek speech), it became unrealistic to pronounce them
"correctly", so Y became merely another way of spelling I, TH a graphical
variant of T, &c.

3) Languages of non-Arab Muslim lands (such as Persian or Turkish) have
frequently treated Arabic as source of new vocabulary, esp. pertaining
to religion or culture. Such words have been adapted to the phonologies
of the non-Arabic languages, replacing emphatics and interdentals with
the nearest equivalents.

I believe that the situation for users (not speakers, except for liturgical
use) of Hebrew would be similar. It would very difficult to maintain a
distinction between qoph and kaph if the language you spoke (Yiddish/German)
didn't have such a phoneme. On the other hand, if the language you speak
*does* support such a distinction (Arabic), then the distinction can be
maintained by pronouncing qoph like the corresponding Arabic phoneme.

--
William Parsons




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