Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Vincent M. Setterholm" <Vincents AT minn.net>]

From: Randall Buth [mailto:ButhFam AT compuserve.com]
...
(Why would someone want to sound like Gensenius?)
...

Perhaps if I give my reasons someone can point me in the right direction....
When learning greek, i found that following really precise systems of
pronunciation greatly eased vocabulary acquisition.  I also found that the
most scholarly reconstructions of the phonology of greek were the least used
systems.  Few people want to bother with things like pitch accents.  So now
I am starting to learn Hebrew, and applying what I've learned from greek, I
figure if I can learn to distinguish between aleph and ayin (unvoiced and
voiced), tet and tau, kaf and qof, and sin and samek, etc. I will be able to
learn vocab faster.  When Jouon was translated to English and revised in
1996, the original phonology system was left intact, so I figured it was
still a valid system, even if not widely used today.  So I was looking for
tapes to hear what those sounds should sound like.

I don't want to use a system that has been proven wrong, but on the other
extreme, I don't want to use a system that makes all these letter pairs
sound the same just because that's easiest for native English speakers.

Suggestions?

Thanks,
Vincent Setterholm