Pronunciation of Hebrew Alphabet-The Holy Tongue: Traumatized by Exile

Interview with Machon Shilo's Rabbi David Bar-Hayim
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[@BlastinRope]

the rabbis voice is so soothing and his knowledge so deep and enlightening

[@M.athematech]

There are other languages that have also had dramatic changes in their pronunciation over time, English is one. Old English had both the German hard and soft ch sounds which are lost in modern English, the former is still indicated by a silent gh but the later which occurred for example at the end of the adverb suffix -ly is gone completely both in pronunciation and spelling. Most modern English dialects do not retain a distinction between the w and wh sounds and some dialects that do have both (like some people from California) no longer matches the w vs wh spelling. A similar situation with the distinction between the w and wr sounds. The palatal g sound is also gone and became the y sound. The r sound also changed dramatically splitting into different sounds and in many dialects dropped after a vowel. The kn cluster gets pronounced just as n. There have been radical changes to the vowels, with many simply becoming a zero vowel in places. The eo sound in the name Beowulf is gone completely ...

[@M.athematech]

The original pronunciation of the sibilant sounds in Hebrew is also tricky. I already remaked that tzadi was probably like the Ashkenazi tz but with the emphatic quality of the Temani tzadi. When we look at samech, zayin, shin, sin, things get quite complicated. Evidence from Ancient Egyptian transcription of Hebrew/Canaanite indicate that a samech was probably originally pronounced like the modern Ashkenazi tzadi, it was the non-emphatic counterpart to the tzadi, but later softened to its current s sound.

[@astrot5818]

Actually, when the Jews left Israel, they spoke Aramaic as their daily language, and only used Hebrew for prayer and in synagogue.

[@jabujolly9020]

I saw another video that sats that the Teimani pronunciation is not the closest to the original. The Iraqi pronunciation is.

[@dovbarleib3256]

Maybe בגדכפת is meant to be hard with the dagesh (B,G,D,K,P,T), and without the dagesh, one would add an h in English. Bh=V Gh=? or J. Dh= hard Th. Kh=ch Ph, and soft Th.

[@M.athematech]

Things are also complicated when it comes to vav. Its agreed that in some early common ancestor of all Hamito-Semitic languages that the vav was pronounced like an English w which easily interchanges with o/u type vowels like we see in Hebrew. Arabic preserves this most ancient pronunciation. But does that mean the Temani pronunciation is also a case of preservation of this sound and Ashkenazi v is from European influence, or did the ancestral Hamito-Semitic w already become a v in Hebrew and it reverted to w amongst Temanim due to Arabic influence? The latter is plausible given the fact that in Ancient Egyptian the ancestral w had already evolved into an f sound by itself.

[@M.athematech]

Another misconception is that the Temani pronunciation of tzadi as an emphatic s is more accurate than the Ashkenazi tz sound. However the evidence from how a tzadi was transcribed in ancient Greek and in Egyptian indicates that it was an affricative sound (like English sounds ch in church, j in junk, tz in waltz, dz in adze) but the Temani tzadi is not an affricative sound. On the other hand the evidence is also that it was an emphatic sound, so taken all together the tzadi was probably pronounced as an affricate like the Ashkenazi tz but with emphatic quality like the Temani sound.

[@yakigesher-zion7289]

perhaps, but even then, rabbis have said that hebrew consonants are "pure" as in they aren't combinations of different consonants.

[@M.athematech]

@@yakigesher-zion7289 No Italian or German or even Amharic speaker thinks of the tsadi sound as two consonants. An English speaker might think of it as two sounds but then an English speaker never thinks of the English ch as being two sounds or the English j as being two sounds but speakers of other languages often do.

[@yakigesher-zion7289]

Mathematech because a lot of those speakers don’t think about languages linguistically. They don’t give it much thought. If you do give it thought then one would realize it is an affricate, two different letters together.

[@M.athematech]

@@yakigesher-zion7289 Affricates behave as single sounds, see for example this study "Phonological Representation and Phonetic Phasing: Affricates and Laryngeals" by Wolfgang Kehrein.

[@tvmystery261]

how samaritians pronanunce nikuds?

[@batyaseguin3810]

Doesn't the Prophet Nehemiah speak about speaking the language correctly and teaching our children this? What's the best video or we site to learn Lashon Hakodesh and is that what the Temani version is ?

[@samuelbenitez8498]

I am sephardic.

[@anointedblessed1]

Can you please have the cantors sing the vowel and consonant enunciations as it should be in the correct biblical hebrew? Have a musician play the violin or piano to show the prosody of the correct tone and pitch register to help people actually speak the correct biblical hebrew and that way then the prosody or tones in all the other languages will not interfere with enunciation. If you would do that then it would help so much and have a split screen showing you and the other half with the letter or word and then you can teach the letters and the words and the grammar syntax. Thank you so much! If you have recommendations for grammar books that have syntax and the biblical hebrew and the english translations together if you could recommend that thank you. What book do you advise to choose for grammar or have you or will you write one?

[@greenwaterdragon888]

WHAT HAPPEN TO THE Pronunciation of Hebrew Alphabet

[@TheKoldfusion7]

I was under the impression (From Sefer Yetzirah) that there are 7 doubles, בג"ד כפר"ת not 6.

[@The7WISDOMSOFPROVERBS]

Sefer yetzirah respect

[@anointedblessed1]

I know you are learned and can tell by ear the dialects but no one can other than you can and we have no way to correlate it semantically listening to your explanation to anything if we are not from that part of the world so while I appreciate how well traveled you are and learned, others are not so, if you could have the cantors work with you to show the prosody maybe that might help.

[@tonymonikanoble2801]

Dear Mr Bar-Hayim, Firstly, I would like to thank you for sharing your wealth of information and knowledge! Sir, my tongue is English and I know and speak German and I'm now on a quest to learn Heberw and everything associated with HaShem Yahuwah. I use the true name of Yah because he tells me to use it and not belittle and cover up his true perfect name. When I was first learning Hebrew I felt I was learning German all over again. I know this may sound a little over done but this 'V' drives me absolutely crazy. I see WAW as you explained it and all I hear and see in modern Hebrew is this VERY "V" driven German influence. You have provided me with a true treasure sir, of the long forgotten Hebrew vowel sounds... May Yahuwah bless you for this! I have taken on your vowel method and I find that the words and syllables flow much better. I'm truly wondering if there ever was a dreaded German "V" sound in Hebrew? Food for thought Sir ...please read Zechariah 6:9-13... The true link of new and old. ....y'hi shem Yahuwah m'borak me atah w'ad-olam.

[@M.athematech]

Ashkenazi Jews did not live in Italy, they were invited to Europe by Charlemagne from the Middle East and settled in the Rhineland.

[@M.athematech]

We also don't know when w changed to v in Hebrew, or whether Temani pronunciation is a preservation or a reversion. In Ancient Egyptian the corresponding w sound turned into an f sound already in ancient times.

[@M.athematech]

The idea that Ashkenazim originally spoke a Romance language and came from Italy is revisionist history. There is no linguistic evidence for this, there are only a smattering of borrowed Romance words in Yiddish. There are a lot more Slavic words, again only borrowings. Yiddish is predominantly Germanic in vocabulary and grammar and originated from the language of the Rhineland which is in accordance with the recorded history of the origins of the Ashkenazi Jews.

[@M.athematech]

English has a smattering of words from Native American languages, one would never use that fact to argue that the English originated in the Americas, why apply such nonsensical reasoning to Jewish history. Let me answer that ... dig deeper and you will find that all such revisionist history theories about Yiddish are related to a political agenda of denying the Jewish connection to Israel and Jewish origin from the Israelites. They first tried Khazar nonsense. Now that that theory has been thoroughly refuted, the latest nonsense is trying to make out that Ashkenazi Jews are largely Italian. Don't fall for it.

[@M.athematech]

It does predate the Slavic, but there is nothing to suggest that it predates the Germanic components. It accords with the origin of the Ashkenazi Jews at the time of Charlemagne whose rule extended into Italy and whose court had constant dealings with northern Italians. The Jews arrived at that time and it is this northern Italian contact that led to early borrowings of Romance words.

[@charlesschwab1448]

I was interested in the Yemenite Tradition and was led to your information, of which I was interested not in the Proto Hindu German Baccus Edition of Hebrew or it's declension but the real HEBREW if it is even existant, and not from British England.

[@M.athematech]

Another language that has had dramatic changes like Hebrew and English is Greek. Ancient Greek, phi and chi were aspirates but turned into English f and German hard ch sounds over time. The w sound (written in ancient Greek with a letter related to the latin F and Hebew vav) disappeared. Initial s sounds were often softened to an h sound (compare Greek hyper with Latin super) and in modern Greek the h is lost. The affricative ancient Greek zeta sound became a z sound. Diphthong vowels end in an upsilon turned into simple vowels followed by a new v sound.

[@M.athematech]

Then we come to the evidence that in ancient Hebrew different dialects and pronunciation existed. In some dialects, consonants merged but remained separate in others. There is evidence that there were two distinct ayin sounds, a situation that persists in Arabic and is evidenced by the fact that when transliterated into Greek or Latin the one ayin sound (like Arabic ghayin) becomes a gamma/g (like in Gomorrah, Gaza) but the other (like Arabic `ayin) gets dropped in transliteration (as in En-shemesh). Hebrew spelling was based on the dialect where these two sounds had merged so there is a single letter. A similar situation exists with the chet, in some dialects it had two sounds as in Arabic, one which gets transliterated as ch in Latin (the letter chi in Greek) and one which get transliterated as h in Latin (dropped in Greek). Again Hebrew spelling was based on the dialect where the sounds merged. When it comes to shin/sin. Again Hebrew spelling is based on a dialect where these merged into a single sound which is why there is one letter, but unlike with chet and ayin, the dialect that survived is one where a distinction was maintained, and so we had to introduce a dot on the left or right to distinguish the two.

[@M.athematech]

Lets look at what the evidence says about how Quf should be pronounced. The common misconception is that it should be pronounced as in the Arabic prestige pronunciation of the equivalent Arabic letter Qaaf. BUT, there are numerous different pronunciations of Arabic Qaaf across different Arabic dialects and the prestige pronunciation as an unvoiced uvular stop, is just one of these pronunciations and unlikely to have been the original.Another pronunciation of Qaaf besides the unvoiced uvular stop, is a simple unvoiced velar stop like the English k. This pronunciation is found in northern Arabic dialects and is identical to the Ashkenazi pronunciation of Quf. Now there is much evidence that the Engish k is the original pronunciation of Kaf, so this would not have been the original pronunciation of Quf or Qaaf, but it does raise the possibility that the Ashkenazi pronunciation of Quf as a k might have developed amongst Jews in the middle east already before they arrived in Europe.Other pronunciations of Arabic Qaaf are:1.) a glottal stop i.e. like Arabic Alif with a Hamza,2.) as a voiced velar stop i.e. like an English g,3.) as a voiced uvular stop i.e. like the prestige pronunciation but with vibrating vocal cords so that its sounds like a g made further back,4.) as the English j (these communities pronounce the equivalent of gimmel the same way)5.) as a pharyngealized unvoiced velar stop i.e. like a k but with the tongue pulled down so that it has the same quality found in many Arabic pronunciations of the equivalent of Tet or Tzadi.6.) as a glottalized velar stop, like the Ethiopic equivalent of Quf, a k with a forced quality.Notice that the most common place of articulation is velar like the place of articulation of the Ashkenazi Quf, not uvular. Now what was the original Arabic pronunciation of Qaaf? Based on how similar the various pronunciations are to each other and known biases in the directions that changes can occur, the evidence from just the variations alone points to the glottalized velar stop as the original pronunciation of Qaaf.The glottalized unvoiced velar stop is an English k with an accompanying contraction of the vocal cords. In communities that became lazy in contracting the vocal cords, this sound would have become the northern Arabian ordinary English k pronunciation. If on the other hand there was a laziness to pull the tongue up to the hard palate, one gets the glottal stop pronunciation found in other northern Arab dialects. If instead the contraction of the vocal cords is too weak causing them to vibrate, you get the English g pronunciation of southern Arabian dialects. If the latter change occurred in a community in which the g sound later turned into an English j, then in these communities we end up with the j pronunciation of Qaaf found in south eastern Arabic. If the contraction becomes unfocused and spread to other muscles at the back of the mouth, two things occur, the tongue gets pulled to the uvular position and the vocal cords are not contracted enough so that they vibrate and we end up with the voiced uvlar stop pronunciation of Qaaf as in Libyan pronunciation of Gaddafi. If in such a community the contraction of the vocal cords was later dropped completely or alternatively if instead of contracting the vocal cords one contracted too high up in the first place, then one gets the prestigious pronunciation of Qaaf as the unvoiced uvular stop. If instead of contracting the vocal cords one contracts the base of the tongue, we get the pharyngealized velar pronunciation.Comparing with other Semitic languages we find that the Ethiopic languages have the glottalized unvoiced velar Quf sound not uvular and not pharyngealized either. This points to the common proto-Semitic ancestor language having had the glottalized unvoiced velar stop. But wait there is more. Ethiopic has two variants of the glottalized unvoiced velar stop corresponding to Hebrew Quf and Arabic Qaaf. One is labialized (pronounced with rounded lips) and one not. There is strong evidence that the Hebrew Quf was also labialized! How do we know this? Well when the Greeks borrowed the Hebrew-Canaanite alphabet the Quf ended up being borrowed twice! The first time it was used for a sound found in ancient Greek that eventually became to be pronounced in modern Greek like an English f and represented by Greek letter Phi which is derived from Hebrew-Canaanite Quf as it was written in earliest times. Although this sound is an f in modern Greek, the evidence points to it having been a strongly aspirated p sound in ancient Greek - like the upper class British pronunciation of the p in the word pool. In dialects from Cyprus this sound retained an even earlier pronunciation resulted in the Greeks borrowing Quf again as the ancient Greek letter Qoppa to distinguish this sound from Phi. However the Qoppa sound disappeared eventually completely, but the last surviving cases ended up becoming an ordinary k sound not the Phi breathy p sound. All this points to the earliest pronunciation of this sound in Greek as a labialized k. And the fact that Quf was chosen to represent this on two occassions strongly suggests that the Hebrew-Canaanite Quf was also a labialized sound like the Ethiopic labialized version of the glottalized velar stop.Further evidence hinting that Hebrew Quf was labialized right up to Roman times comes from the fact that it was used for transliterating the Roman unvoiced c sound as in Caesar. The Roman C was palatal, pronounced more forward in the mouth than the English k or Hebrew Kaf. The fact that Quf was used for it counts very strongly against the notion that the Quf was uvular as a uvular sound is made further back in the mouth than the velar Kaf not more forward so that it would have been more sensible to represent Roman C with a Kaf not a Quf. However if Quf was velar as we have said , then its choice over Kaf for Roman C makes sense if it was labialized as well, giving it a more forward quality than a Kaf and thus making it the better match for the palatal Roman C.

[@M.athematech]

The subject of determining the original pronunciation is not simple and there are many misconceptions. One such misconception is that the guttural pronunciation of the resh amongst Ashkenazim is the result of European influence and that the dental trill of the Temanim is more correct. The evidence is against that idea. Firstly the Temani resh is a sound that can easily be lengthened, something which does occur in Arabic, yet in Hebrew the resh does not receive a dagesh indicating that it was a sounds that couldn't be easily lengthened, a property of guttural sounds. Moreover comparing Hebrew words with a resh to related Ancient Egyptian words, shows that the resh corresponds to the Egyptian consonant typically transcribed with a symbol that looks like a 3. The evidence is that earliest Egyptian pronunciation of this was a guttural r sound. This means it is plausible that a guttural pronunciation of resh was already present in the common ancestral language of the Hamito-Semitic languages.

[@M.athematech]

OTRACUENTAPERRA Not true because the guttural resh already existed in the Tiberian vocalization and since it was also the pronunciation of the equivalent of resh in Old Egyptian, the sensible conclusion is that it is the original pronunciation of resh preserving a sound that already existed in the common ancestor of the Afro-Asiatic languages.

[@M.athematech]

OTRACUENTAPERRA That's too simplistic. Temanim were not isolated they were influenced by the pronunciation of Arabic which was itself heavily influenced by languages such as Persian and Kurdish - take the Arabic j sound for example which came from non-Semitic influence and influenced the Temani pronunciation of gimel.

[@M.athematech]

OTRACUENTAPERRA At a very early stage in Muslim history, Arabic, originally a minority language became heavily influenced by non-Semitic languages particularly Persian dialects. Arabic pronunciation then affected Temani pronunciation of Hebrew. Gimel ended up pronounced like English j, patach and segol vowels end up pronounced like English a in cat. Tzadi while retaining an emphatic pronunciation of ancient Hebrew lost its affricative character although Ashkenazi maintained the latter Guttural pronunciation of resh was lost by Arabic and subsequently by Temani Hebrew. Saying Temani is closer to original Hebrew is subjective and based on 19th century romanticist views on the purity of Arabic.

[@M.athematech]

OTRACUENTAPERRA Can you give me an example of something clearly Germanic? Arguing that guttural resh is Germanic is nonsense because Tiberian Hebrew already had it thousands of years before German or French acquired it. Saying Ashkenazi tzadi is Germanic because it is affricative is nonsense, the ancient tzadi was also affricative (although emphatic as well). Ashkenazi chet and chaf are not identical to German hard ch, being more guttural. The idea that Temani pronunciation is closer to original ancient Hebrew is overly simplistic and based on old misconceptions, neither Temani nor Ashkenazi pronunciation is particularly close to Biblical Hebrew, which itself evolved over centuries.

[@M.athematech]

Your statement that it doesn't sound Semitic is based on the misconception that Semitic is meant to sound Arabic. But Arabic phonology was heavily influenced by Persian and Kurdish languages. In particular, softening of hard g to a j or zh sound, loss of the guttural r in most dialects. Position of emphasis varied amongst different Semitic languages and dialects already in ancient times.