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  • From: "Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>
  • To: <jkilmon AT historian.net>, "Will Parsons" <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Yemenite Hebrew
  • Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2010 05:07:23 +0100

What about shin and sin in Yemenite Hebrew?

South Arabic is also conservative for laterals.


Arnaud Fournet




----- Original Message ----- From: "Will Parsons" <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>
To: <jkilmon AT historian.net>
Cc: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 31, 2010 10:05 PM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Yemenite Hebrew



On Sun, 31 Oct 2010 12:15:17 -0500, "Jack Kilmon" <jkilmon AT historian.net> wrote:
I'll check out the Wiki thing. The last time I was in Israel, I stayed with
a friend of mine at Tel Aviv University. He was a Yemenite Jew and was
explaining some of the phonology. It has become an item of interest now
because I am doing a lot of work on ancient inscriptions. It's natural when
you read them to wonder about things like phonology, sibilants, waw
consecutives, etc. I guess what intrigued me is what circumstances would
preserve archaisms in phonology in Hebrew spoken in Yemen if, in fact, it is
true.

There may be some justification for thinking that in certain respects the
Yemenite pronunciation may be more archaic that Ashkenazic and Sephardic.

In a different post on this thread, Isaac Fried cited Wikipedia as stating:

"It is believed by some scholars that its (Yemeni) phonology was heavily
influenced by spoken Yemeni Arabic".

This is undoubtably true. Once a language is no longer the mother tongue
of those who use it, it cannot help but be heavily influenced by the
language(s) they do speak in everyday use. So also, we *must* assume
that the Sephardic pronunciation is heavily influenced by Mediterranean
(esp. Iberian) Romance languages, and that the Ashkenazic pronunciation
is heavily influenced by Eastern European (German/Polish/Lithuanian...)
languages.

Yemenite preserves a fricative pronunciation for non-daghesh daleth,
gimel, and taw, whereas both Ashkenazic and Sephardic do not. Why
should this be? The immediate answer that suggests itself is that
German/Polish/Lithuanian on the one hand and Spanish/Portuguese on the
other do not have phonemic distinctions between [d] vs [ð], &c. while
Arabic does. (But note that the situation of having Arabic as the
host language made possible the preservation of a distinction that
would be difficult to maintain when the host language is e.g. Spanish
or German.)

But considering that *all* traditional pronunciations of Hebrew have
been subject to the phonologies of the host languages, Yemenite has
the advantage that the host language is Arabic, a language closely
related to Hebrew, and that the Yemenite community is closer in
proximity to the original area where Hebrew was spoken. Which Romance
language is closest to Latin? Most people would say Italian, which is
unsurprising since Italian is closest to (in fact, encompassing) the
original area of Latin speech. To be sure, there are numerous instances
where elements of Latin pronunciation or vocabulary are better preserved
in other Romance languages, and the same caveats apply to Yemenite Hebrew -
we must not assume that Yemenite Hebrew is automatically closer to the
"original" Hebrew, no more that Italian is automatically closer to Latin.

--
William Parsons
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