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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Yemenite Hebrew

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  • From: K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
  • To: Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Yemenite Hebrew
  • Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2010 19:18:25 -0700

Will:

On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 3:17 PM, Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> Quite true, but there are differences in the way natively spoken languages
> are influenced by the surrounding languages and purely learned languages.
>

My understanding is that Yemeni Hebrew was a learned language up until
Yemeni Jews moved to Israel, at which point they incorporated their
pronunciation into modern Israeli.


> If Yemeni Hebrew were the mother tongue to a community, I wouldn't be the
> least surprised to see it incorporate Arabic phonemes that had not
> previously
> existed in their Hebrew speech (an emphatic interdental, for example). I
> think this kind of borrowing is a good deal less likely when the language
> community is not actively using the language for everyday communication.
>

Actually, I think it is more likely that the language used as a second
language to incorporate the sounds of the majority language of the
environment, and to lose its own sounds. This I notice among children of
immigrants, as they speak with their parents: sounds that are not found in
English are often not pronounced by the children, and they substitute the
closest equivalents from English for the missing sounds. There is no reason
that Hebrew is different.


> Here the influence is mainly negative - not too negative in the case of
> Yemeni consonants, because of the richness of the Arabic consonantal
> inventory, but more noticeably in the other traditional pronunciations,
> where the distinctions between daghesh and non-daghesh pronunciation of
> letters has been eliminated where the host languages do not support such a
> distinction.
>

Are you sure that distinction was not introduced into Hebrew from closely
related languages? I think it was.

>
> > How many of those phonemes are true phonemes, indicating
> > difference in meaning?
>
> I imagine it would hard to find instances of minimal pairs where a daghesh
> (lene) and non-daghesh daleth or gimel would produce a difference in
> meaning. I don't think this precludes them from considered separate
> phonemes, however. The Massoretes certainly heard a difference, or they
> wouldn't have bothered with distinguishing them in the first place.
> Compare
> the distinction in English between the voiced and voiceless interdental
> fricatives. To my mind, there is no doubt that they are separate phonemes
> -
> they are not conditional variants of each other and they are clearly
> indicated by separate pronunciation symbols in dictionaries. But finding
> a minimal pair is quite difficult - the only one I've been able to come up
> with is "thy" vs "thigh", and I've had to use an archaism to do it!
>

How about vat, fat, pat and bat? Or wit and with? Sort and short? Boot and
booth? Float and bloat? Plot and blot?

Do such pairs exist in Masoretic Hebrew?

At one time I tried to learn the Masoretic points, really tried, but that
was years ago. I gave that up when I started realizing that the points are
sometimes wrong as far as meaning are concerned. I have since realized more
reasons to distrust them, including that they do not reflect Biblical era
pronunciation.

>
> --
> Will Parsons
>

Karl W. Randolph.




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