attitudes towards certain pronunciations of Hebrew

[0stsee]

Got it.

Toda raba, Babelfish!

[kelevgadol]

Shalom. I love that you asked this question as it is a very important issue.

Many people in Israel do make these distinctions an so do not suffer from this ambiguity. We now know for a linguistic fact what the 32 sounds are the consonants make. Now to answer your question. What reaction would an Israeli have if you spoke unambiguous Hebrew? Well from my experience in Hebraic circles some would like you for it but others will also hate you bitterly for it. Especially the 'w' sound. I have been kicked out of groups just for using the 'w 'sound in transliteration and told anything other than sephardic or ashkenazic is not tolerated. Because of this I have created a Facebook page called "learn Hebrew uncensored" for those that love unambiguous Hebrew. Most unambiguous Hebrew is the same but one letter called 7ayin can be ع or NG like siNg. Either is fine. Unambiguous is what matters. It's estimated that just adopting two sounds in Hebrew can reduce the memory load by 20%! Furthermore ambiguous Hebrew forces the learner to look up words in the dictionary 5 different ways. It wastes time.

To quote a mizrachi in Israel, "the Ashkenazi accent flattens Hebrew, narrows it and, worst of all, makes it confusing and vague" Says Tsadok. "Hebrew has become a crippled language that needs crutches to be understood by its own speakers."
Here is a YouTube video explaining the transliteration numbers in Mnemonic Hebrew
What are those numbers in Mnemonic Hebrew?: http://youtu.be/UjQzmIl6CX8

Also search learn Hebrew uncensored on Facebook. The one place that supports and tries to preserve native sounds of Hebrew.

[Hadronic]

there is not and never was a difference between Alef and Hey,


(when hey appears in the middle of the word, it is pronounced like the H in hot, but thats a newer use).


Tet is not an Hebrew letter, and its used for non Hebrew words (including words that entered Hebrew in biblical times),

I strongly doubt that Even Shoshan wrote any of these frivolous claims...

[Babelfish]

So do I.

[ido66667]

there is not and never was a difference between Alef and Hey, they are some thing that had left from the
times before the "Tiberian" punctuation, when "imut kria" was used.
before the "Tiberian" punctuation was invented in the 6/7 century, there was no vowels in Hebrew, and ppl used "Imut kria" letters;
Alef= A (in most cases), Hey= A, E in the end of the words (and O in some cases)
Vav= O and U, Yod= I or IE.
but, as you can see, "Imut Kria" is not perfect, and than in the 6/7 century, many kinds of punctuation systems were invented, today we use the Tiberian punctuation (nikud Tiberiany).
(Imut kria= reading confirmation).

(when hey appears in the middle of the word, it is pronounced like the H in hot, but thats a newer use).

about the rest, resh in modern Hebrew is not pronounced like in ancient Hebrew, but no one knows how it was pronounced, there are only especulations.
Tet is not an Hebrew letter, and its used for non Hebrew words (including words that entered Hebrew in biblical times),
it is speculated that it sounds different, and it was used because the words that entered Hebrew used this sound, but no one knows for sure if there is difference
between tet and tav.
there was a time when Hebrew experts thought that the Yemenite pronunciation is the right one, but today we know that they just "borrow" from Arabic,
and the right pronunciation is different.

any way, if you want to use the Yemenite pronunciation, as you suggest, ppl wont see it as weird, even if not always know what you want.
(they`ll probably just think you are a Yemenite).
the only thing, don`t use Yemenite Tzadic, this one may actually confuse ppl.

ה is not the same as א:
א - Glottal Stop.
ה - Voiceless Glottal Frictive. It is written in English as "Hey" and not "Aye" after all.
Obviously... Go to Wikipedia and hear it.
Saying that they are the same is like saying that A=H, both are absurd propositions.
The only cases they are the same is when ה is used at the end of a word (Not always) as a Em kriya, like in:
ראיה - Re-i-ya.
Also, it is Emut Kriya, "Mothers of reading": en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis
If it is not used in the end of the word it should be pronounced as a voiceless glottal and it is definitely not new, Hey always corresponded to H as they both came from Phoenician letter.
Also look at the origins part in here: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_(letter)

Tet was defiantly a letter in unique letter in Proto-Semitic and was one of the unique Semitic emphatic sound and it still pronounced this way in Arabic and Syriac (The language of the Assryans. Fun fact: The classical Mongolic script that is written from top to bottom decended from the Syriac script).
My guess is that when the European Ashkenazi Jews revitalized Hebrew they had hard time pronouncing the emphatic sounds, so they got rid of them.
If I remember correctly, the decision to use Tet for foreign words (אינטרנט וכדומה) was made not long ago by the academy for Hebrew.

Speaking of the Yemani pronunciation, it is much more correct then other ones, because many sounds like the emphatic sounds were lost in modern Hebrew.

And yes, I am pretty sure Even Shoushan didn't say such stuff.