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

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  • From: "Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>
  • To: "Will Parsons" <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Yemenite Hebrew
  • Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2010 23:37:04 +0100


----- Original Message ----- From: "Will Parsons" <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>

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
***

You probably have a point to some extent
but all your examples deal with how non native phonologies are adjusted to other systems.

I find it odd to consider these examples relevant for Hebrew as "spoken" (or read) by Jews.
Did they not have a tradition of reading it at least, in *continuity* with the times they used it on a daily basis?
This language never was foreign. Is Latin a foreign language for Italians?


There are also counter-examples to your theory: Latin for mass in France used to have the phoneme tch as in Italian: this is not a native phoneme in French (lost centuries ago).
But people say: ecce homo: e-tche o-mo.
One could also mention Russian bog "god": the only word in the language with the sound -gh- spirant voiced velar.

The theory that people will necessarily lose contrasts because the host language does not have them is too superficial.
Actually in sacred languages, they have *more* contrasts than in ordinary speech.
And you could add all the "primitive" societies where more often than not there is a special language, with often special words and special sounds, for myths and religious activities.

Arnaud Fournet








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