Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk>]

I'm sorry but this is completely inaccurate. In Spanish there is a  
letter b but it has a much harder and more distinct sound. The letter  
v can be pronounced in a number of different ways depending on which  
sounds come before or after it. The sounds range in the spectrum  
between a 'v' and a 'b' but are never quite completely either. It is  
only the perception of the untrained ear which causes you to hear  
either the one or the other by applying some kind of neural distance  
metric to what measure the sound from what we are accustomed to  
categorising as a 'b' or a 'v'. The field of phonetics is by no means  
an understood science. I know this because I have first hand  
experience of working with speech signals which is where just about  
every theory goes completely out of the window and the practicalities  
of what speech really is show up and put a quash to any so called  
'complete' description of phonetics that exists.

If I was to hazard a guess I would say the symbols in Hebrew were  
considered to be distinct sounds by their inventors. The letters that  
the Massoretes chose to point as begedkefet letters were *probably* of  
the kind we are discussing in the case of the Spanish 'v'. i.e. the  
kind of letter natives have no problems in classifying with one letter  
but to a non native seem to have two completely different sounds.

If you have contact with the Spanish language for any great period of  
time you will start to notice why it is one sound and understand the  
common features of each and every way it is pronounced.

At the end of the day every sound is not 'a speech signal' but a  
*range* of speech signals. When the speech signal ranges of what one  
culture defines to be one sound do not map what ranges the other  
culture uses there arises misunderstanding.

The same thing can be said of colours (another form of signal defined  
by ranges). When going from a pure yellow to a pure orange in every  
possible discrete step by changing the frequency of the signal at what  
point does yellow become orange? And at what point does orange become  
red? While there may be significant agreement between many of what is  
definitely yellow and what is definitely orange there may be quite  
some disagreement at the boundaries even in one culture. If you add  
into the mix the fact that another culture may have different average  
ranges the matter becomes even more complicated. Like the English man  
whose Ukrainian wife keeps saying his eyes are grey when they are  
quite clearly (at least to him) that they are blue. The man doesn't  
really take any offense but if you turned the tables the situation  
could get rather nasty ;-)

In summary, it is an exercise in futility to say that the Hebrews  
classified two different sounds with one character. It would, perhaps,  
be more accurate to say 'What was one range of sounds to the Hebrew  
ear we think, possibly may have at the intersection of the ranges we  
have established of two different sounds.'

James Christian


Quoting 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



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