Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Chris:

When I studied Hebrew in class in college, my professor taught us the Yemenite pronunciation. The reason given was that this was the only dialect that gives voice to all the points as indicated by the Masoretes.

The father of modern Israeli Hebrew came from a German speaking background, so was unable to pronounce some of the phones found in Yemenite Hebrew, one of which was the waw. Hence the vov with the same pronunciation as the vet..

Since college I have come to the conclusion that my professor, by extension his professors as well, were wrong, that in Biblical times there was no difference in pronunciation of the BeGaD KeFaT. Nor any difference between the Sin and Shin.

Yeah, this is off the subject, but a pleasant diversion.

Karl W. Randolph.

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 2:57 AM, Chris Watts <dekruidnootjes AT eircom.net> wrote:

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