Recent Notes on Hebrew Pronunciation

Recent Notes On Hebrew Pronunciation Recent Notes On Hebrew Pronunciation By Rabbi Avi Grossman Edited by Mr. Jonathan Grossman Many of the ideas discussed in this article were in my notebook for some time, and just as I was getting around to preparing them for publication, my prolific colleague Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein sent a copy of Professor Geoffrey Khan’s The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew to me. After reading it and briefly corresponding with the author, I concluded that it was time to release this article. Professor Khan invites the yeshiva world to read his book, available for free at this link, and to check out hiswebsite . Full disclosure: although Prof. Khan’s research is enlightening, not only do I not agree with or endorse everything he claims, I do not believe that certain points are admissible as halachic sources in the Bet Midrash. With regards to the details of halachic pronunciation, I have already released my own book wherein I try to show how the rishonim would pronounce Tiberian Hebrew, and I direct readers to Rabbi Bar Hayim’s videos on the subject. Rabbi Bar Hayim follows the views of Rabbi Benzion Cohen. All of us are attempting to recreate something that we cannot really know, and for now, we still have to debate the fine details. I seriously doubt that the Masoretes spoke a ritual Hebrew that sounded exactly the way any of us describes it. Before getting into the nitty gritty of Prof. Khan’s arguments, I would like to introduce some basic ideas that can be gleaned from an elementary, comparative study of Arabic. A few years ago I took some classes in modern spoken Arabic, which I hoped would help me begin to read Maimonides’s original writings. Aside from helping me realize how there is so much I have to learn about that language, it helped me learn more about Biblical Hebrew. Fifteen years ago, when I started working on what would become my aforementioned book about Masoretic Hebrew, I wondered about certain missing consonants. Thankfully, those and many other questions I had have been somewhat answered, and I now wish to present some of my own findings. I realize that for some, these may not be so novel, but my intention is to bring them to the attention of those in the yeshiva world who, for whatever reason, would enjoy learning about this but will not come across these issues in their regular courses of study. Concerning the Consonants: Arabic has only a cursive form, unlike our Hebrew which has had over the course of time many forms, including the common, Assyrian block form and the various cursive forms, which thanks to the advent of modern-Hebrew education has become much more standardized. Also, many letters have up to four forms: the isolated (stand-alone) form, the initial form, which the letter takes at the beginning of the word or in the middle of the word when the previous letter is cursively non- connective, the medial form, and the final form. For some letters, there is significant overlap. See a chart here, for instance. The Arabic letter alif is basically the Hebrew alef, but it is used much more often as amater lectionis, the Latin (.See below) .אם קריאה translation of the Hebrew The Arabic equivalent of bet, ba, is always strong, meaning that in most forms of Arabic there is no letter that represents the weak bet sound, that of V, while the Arabic equivalent of pei, fa, is always weak, and never strong.This means that in most forms of Arabic there is no letter that represents the strong pei sound, that of P. Thus, many native Arabic speakers have a hard time pronouncing foreign words that have the P or V sounds. Today, in Israel at least, the solution is to use the stop, B, to also represent the P, thus biano, for piano, while the V ,ﺑﻴـــــﺎﻧﻮ giving us words like and sometimes it is marked ,ف , sound is a variant of thefa with three dots on top instead of one to indicate the V. Consequently, Israelis who pronounce their surnames that begin with vav in the standard, European-influenced accent, e.g. Vaynshtain instead of Weinstein, have the Arabs spell their names with a variant of fa. Unlike in Hebrew, the diacritical dots you find above and below certain Arabic letters are not vocalizations but rather critical components of the letters. It seems that early on the diacritics were used to distinguish between alternate sounds created by single letters, like the dagesh qal is and was used to distinguish between sounds made by single letters, while other letters originally had unique forms, but evolved into identical forms, and the diacritics were introduced in order to preserve the distinctions. The initial and medial forms of the Arabic letters ba, nun, ya (the equivalent of the Hebrew yod), and ta (the equivalent of the Hebrewtau ) are orthographically identical and distinguished by the diacritics, the ba with one dot below, the ya with two; the nun with one above, and the ta with two, even though in all of the earlier Semitic alphabets, the equivalent consonants had distinct forms. This has made Arabic very receptive to new letters: it is very easy to modify an already existing letter form by adding anywhere from one to three dots as a superscript or subscript. In Hebrew, we still have not completely assimilated new consonantal symbols into new etc.), and the typical method of ,ג׳, ץ׳, ז׳ letters (the representing them looks out of place in context. Gimmel: In many languages, the hard G sound has been assimilated to a soft one, and this is as true in Arabic as it is with certain English words. However, the Arabic jim is not always pronounced like a J, which, as I pointed out in my book, is a combination of the D sound followed by a voiced shin (SH) sound, or the voiced equivalent of the CH sound achieved by clustering the T and SH sounds. Rather, jim makes the voiced shin sound (the G in massage) on its own. Also, the jim is still pronounced like a hard G in some countries, such as Egypt. Dal is the Arabic equivalent of our dalet, and it, like our dalet, has a weak, fricative counterpart, the dhal, (as in “the”), although unlike Hebrew, in which the weakness or strongness of the bet, gimmel, dalet, kaf, pei, or tau (the “beged kefet” letters) depends on the form of the word, and one set of rules governs all of these letters, in Arabic it seems that dal and dhal no longer have such a relationship, and as above, are now considered separate letters. The Arabic waw serves the same purposes as our vav. More on that soon. Het has its equivalent in the Arabic ha, while the sound of our kaf’s weak counterpart, khaf, appears in Arabic as a variation of the ha, pronounced kha, and the latter is represented by writing the former with an additional upper ,ج ,respectively, while the one with a lower dot ,خ and ح :dot is the aforementioned jim. This seems to indicate that the weak sound of the khaf that distinguishes our Hebrew so much from English is a historical latecomer, and that while we first made it a variation of kaf, the Arabs made it a variation of het, and indeed, since in most Jewish circles the het is pronounced (incorrectly) as a khaf, perhaps the Arabs were just anticipating us. Many academics claim that the sound migrated; even in Hebrew the sound of the khaf was made by the het in certain words, but later, when all hets were pronounced alike, the sound was given to the weak kaf. This would explain why, for instance, certain proper nouns have been historically transliterated unusually. E.g., Jericho, Rachel, etc. The Arabic counterpart of tet is the ta, but unlike our Hebrew tet which has no voiced counterpart, like tau has dalet and samech has zayin, the Arabic ta does have a voiced .which is the D in words like Ramadan ,ض ,counterpart, the dad Just like English transliterations of Hebrew commonly lose the distinction between tau and tet, they also lose the distinction between dal and dad, and in many systems used to teach Arabic to Hebrew speakers, they simplify the dad and tell them that just like they always pronounce the tet like a tau, they can pronounce the dad like a dal. The Arabic counterpart of the yod is ya, and it pretty much behaves like the yod, but has traditionally been used as a mater lectionis even more than yod has. For example, many transliterations of Hebrew into Arabic not only use the ya to represent the Hebrew tzeirei, they even use theya to represent the segol in open, accented syllables. I was asked concerning the yod in second-person-possessive ba-NE-cha: if the yod בנֶיךָ male suffixes, as in, for example is not meant to be pronounced as part of the segol vowel, why is it even there? My proposed answer is that it is there to distinguish the singular from the plural, along the lines of the silent yod in the third person counterparts of those ba-NAW, which most never even get בנָיו nouns, for example in around to wondering why we do not pronounce asba-NAYW . I may have once been בניו believe that the yod in words such as pronounced, and this explains the suffix’s relationship to its x.

Load more