Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Trevor & Julie Peterson" <speederson AT erols.com>]

While it seems that there was a distinction at some point between the two, many follow the Modern Hebrew pronunciation system and don't make a distinction between G. and G, D. and D, T. and T, but do distinguish B. from B (/v/), K. from K (similar to Heth), and P. from P (/f/).  If you've been using the Classical, academic pronunciation system, you would also need to change W from /w/ to /v/, lengthen almost all instances of Hireq, pronounce all a-vowels the same, and (without going into a lot of detail) treat a lot more Shewas as silent.  A number of Hebrew grammars would present this system in more detail, including Bryan Rocine's new introductory grammar and the intermediate grammar by van der Merwe, et al.  Also, because it's based on Modern Hebrew, I presume you could find some help from Modern Hebrew references (or speakers, if any happen to be available to you).

 

In the Classical system, which is outlined in Seow's introductory grammar, the simple answer to your question is that one generally does not make a distinction between the two.  An alternative, found in Jouon, is an attempt at reconstructing Masoretic pronunciation.  Its advantage is that it tries to distinguish the sounds of all the letters from one another to some degree and would probably be a bit more helpful for learning vocabulary and paradigms with correct spelling.  It is also, at least in theory, a pronunciation of the language that was living at one point (which is not generally thought to be true of the Classical approach).  One disadvantage is that it's not living now, so you can't really interact with native speakers, as you can with Modern Hebrew.  It is also probably the most complicated system to learn, because it draws upon a number of Semitic (chiefly Arabic) sounds that have no close parallel in Western languages.  In that system, G would have a velarized pronunciation, somewhat analogously to K vs. K.  Spirantized D vs. hard D would be analogous to /th/ vs. /t/ (something like the /th/ in English "then").

 

Trevor Peterson

CUA/Semitics

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Bailey [mailto:jonathan.bailey AT gmx.de]
Sent: Saturday, April 14, 2001 6:38 PM
To: Biblical Hebrew
Subject: Pronunciation

Can someone clarify for me the pronunciation of Gimmel and Dalet with and without dagesh lene?

 

Jon

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