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