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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: Sat, 06 Nov 2010 09:29:45 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 23:37:04 +0100, "Arnaud Fournet"
<fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>
> ----- 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.

And how would that be different from how Hebrew is influenced by German,
Spanish or Arabic? (By the way, the first example above is between closely
related languages, Hindi & Sanskrit.)

> 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?

The whole point is that Hebrew was *not* a spoken language (until its recent
revival). No, a tradition of reading is not sufficient. There is a
fundamental difference between languages spoken as a mother tongue and those
that aren't (sometimes referred to as "living" and "dead" languages - though I
don't like this terminology). And yes. Hebrew *was* a foreign language. A
Yiddish speaking child in Eastern Europe had to learn it just like people
today in the Europe or the United States do.

The situation of Latin with respect to the Roman Catholic church is similar.
And in no cases did it retain in local pronunciation phomemes alien to the
host language. It had/has to be learned as a foreign language, even by those
who speak one of its descendents. Italians have to learn Latin too (though no
doubt they have an advantage).

> 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.

This would be a counter-example if it were the whole story, but it isn't.
Historically, French used a pronunciation derived from mediaeval Latin which
underwent the same phonetic changes that French did. This happened to the
varieties of Latin spoken throughout Europe, resulting a huge disparity in
local pronunciation. (The English and French varieties were probably the
worst, owing to the more extensive phonological changes that took place in
English and French.) This situation was problematic for the RC church, which
used Latin as its official language. So, relatively late (I think it was
towards the end of the 19th century, but I could be wrong), a common way
pronouncing Latin was promulgated, that which is now referred to as the
"Ecclesiastic pronunciation". This was basically the Italian national
pronunciation, natural enough since the seat of the Pope was in Italy, and
a good choice on other grounds (the Italian pronunciation being probably
the best of the national pronunciations).

So, your ecce/e-tche is not the result of the survival of a phomeme in Latin
pronunciation otherwise lost in French, but the result of its re-introduction.

(You would know better than I, but surrounded by languages that have the
English/Spanish/Italian ch sound, I would doubt that many French speakers have
any difficulty pronouncing it, no more than English speakers have much
difficulty pronouncing the [x] in "Bach".)

> 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.

"Special" languages are irrelevant to the situation of learning a language
that is not spoken.

(A note to the moderators - I realize that I may have gone on more than I
should have on the subject of Latin pronunciation, but I did want to make
clear the circumstances of how it arrived to its present state.)

--
William Parsons




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