On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>wrote:
> …
> 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.)
>
It must be remembered that languages not only lose phonemes, but also gain
them. They gain them through contact with other languages. Southern Arabia
has traditionally had more extensive contacts with a variety of different
languages than any other Arabic speaking area, as a result, is it any
surprise that Yemeni Jews would have the greatest number of phonemes when
they speak Hebrew? How many of those phonemes are true phonemes, indicating
difference in meaning?
>
> 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.
>