Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Chris Watts <dekruidnootjes AT eircom.net>]

just a quick interjection here, and not taking sides since it is hard  
to follow.  But it was said that Karl pronounces vav as a 'w'.  Well  
I read a long time ago that the yemenite jews were considered to have  
a purer pronounciation than the western jews, this was written by an  
israeli, unfortunately I really can not remember where I read this.   
Anyway they pronounced all their vavs as 'w' and also they made  
distinctions between a soft 'gimmel and a hard gimmel (like the  
english gerrard for example) and also a they made distinctions  
between a hard tav and a soft tav (almost like the 'th' in there).   
Now this probably has no bearing on the present discussion, but I  
thought perhaps it note worthy of interest.  Especially since I do  
remember very clearly that odd statement by the Jewish linguist who  
wrote the article saying that he considered this to be a 'purer'  
pronounciation. I thought that maybe he knew something that would  
have been interesting to learn, but he never talked about why he  
thought that, pity.


Chris Watts
Ireland