Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Vadim Cherny <him AT vadimcherny.org>]

The b/v confusion in Spanish, as far as I know, is a relatively modern 
phenomenon. Tracing back to Lartin, b/v's are sufficiently distinct.
Moreover, Spanish does not so much confuse the two as it abandoned [b] 
except in the word-initial positions (which we would call dagesh kal).
In that way, Spanish is the opposite of Hebrew: Spanish conflated two 
letters in a single sound while the Masoretes allegedly have two 
non-allophonic sounds for the same letter.

Vadim Cherny



James Read wrote:
> > Well, b/v are not "completely different" sounds neither. :)
>
> Yep. See the Spanish language as an interesting example of this. The 
> Spanish letter 'v' to the untrained English ear will sometimes sound 
> like a 'v' and sometimes sound like a 'b'. There is also a Spanish 'b' 
> which is distinguishable enough (to the trained ear) to never be 
> confused with the Spanish 'v' when it sounds like an English 'b'.
>
> Some don't really hear or distinguish the difference between a 'w' and 
> a 'v'. And some don't distinguish the difference between an 'l' and an 
> 'r'. In Ukrainian there is a hard 'l' and a soft 'l'. The difference 
> is as minute as making a small space between your tongue and the roof 
> of you mouth.
>
> James Christian