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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Dagesh - a different sound or aspiration?

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  • From: James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk>
  • To: Vadim Cherny <him AT vadimcherny.org>
  • Cc: B-Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Dagesh - a different sound or aspiration?
  • Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:58:06 +0100

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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