Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Chris Watts <dekruidnootjes AT eircom.net>]

Hi Karl, well jut one thing that gets me thinking, I do remember in  
Judges somewhere, that there is evidence of two dialects, one of the  
tribes could not pronounce the shin as 'sh' but only as 's'.  So how  
would you account for that?
Chris Watts
Ireland
Chris Watts
Ireland



On 16 Jul 2013, at 13:13, K Randolph wrote:

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