eskandar wrote:I'm not Israeli, so take my outsider's perspective for whatever it's worth:
1. In my experience, yes some of these pronunciations are used in everyday conversation, but only by very specific populations, for example:One thing all three groups generally have in common is bilingualism, with either Arabic or Yiddish as a mother tongue. I think there are exceptionally few Israelis today who are natively monolingual in Hebrew (that is, excluding those who are natively bilingual in Hebrew and Arabic/Yiddish) but don't speak with the standard Israeli pronunciation.
- Older (60+ years old) Jews from the Arab world who are first generation Hebrew speakers sometimes maintain some of the pronunciation of their liturgical tradition.
- Some Hebrew-speaking Palestinians pronounce Hebrew similarly to the above group, in particular with ayin and het.
- Some ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews who live in particularly cloistered Yiddish-speaking communities use some of the Ashkenazi pronunciations when speaking Hebrew. As far as I've noticed, this isn't always consistent and involves a good deal of code-switching between standard Israeli pronunciation and Yiddish-inflected Ashkenazi pronunciation.
squee100 wrote:I mean the entire liturgical tradition, not just a few consonants and/or vowels.
eskandar wrote:In that case no, no one speaks Hebrew like that as far as I'm aware.
squee100 wrote:Do you think there are any Israelis who would like to speak like that? If so, why don't they?
squee100 wrote:I'm not a native speaker and, like I said, more interested in liturgical Hebrew, but glido or jălidho for גלידה "ice cream" doesn't sound absurd to me at all, nor does isoin or ʿithön for עתון "newspaper."
Drink wrote:1. Only ע and ח are common in certain segments of the population. If you go to Israel, you will hear them. I've seen written that there are also a some people who pronounce ק as [q] and even fewer that pronounce צ as emphatic [s], but I've never heard these two among ordinary people. Other aspects of traditional pronunciations are virtually-nonexistent.
eskandar wrote:That's been my observation as well. I've always wondered why it is that specifically ע and ח have been preserved and not the other pharyngeal pronunciations. I think I did notice ק as [q] occasionally in the speech of the Moroccan father in the film שחור.
n8an wrote:I honestly think the maintenance of ע and ח as pharyngeals as opposed to ק probably has something to do with the fact that almost all people who pronounce ח and ע as pharyngeals are native Arabic speakers who apply their accent from Arabic to Hebrew; and in most Arabic dialects, ق is not pronounced as q.
eskandar wrote:I don't think this is the reason. As you mentioned, pronunciation of ق is a lot more varied than your list makes it seem.
There's the additional complication that most Arabic speakers (from any country) pronounce the ق as [q] when reading/speaking fuS7a, so they do have the sound in their phonemic inventory.
Furthermore, if they were influenced by the pronunciation of their native dialects, we'd expect to find the Hebrew letter ק pronounced variously as a glottal stop, [g], etc., but that doesn't seem to have been the case. Also, it wouldn't explain why no one pronounced the ט pharyngeally despite the presence of ط in Arabic which is realized pharyngeally regardless of dialect.
Takhles, at most the fact that Arabic-speakers had ح and ع in their phonemic inventory partly explains why they kept these sounds in Hebrew, but there's a lot more to the story that I don't think that explains.
Drink wrote:It's definitely not only those who ate native Arabic speakers who maintain ח and ע. It's become the Mizrahi sociolect, though dying off in the younger generation now. Firstly, many second-generation Mizrahim in Israel maintain ח and ע. And secondly, I've even found that even second-generation Mizrahim of Persian origin (for example) do this, and Persian does not have ח and ע.
n8an wrote:There's the additional complication that most Arabic speakers (from any country) pronounce the ق as [q] when reading/speaking fuS7a, so they do have the sound in their phonemic inventory.
For sure they can do it, but speaking fus7a (or Classical Arabic) is very very rare for any reason other than reading Quran. Even at school, fus7a is only read. Class discussions seem to basically never be in fus7a. It's a sound they can produce, but don't do so 99.99% of their lives.
The question then becomes, why continue pronouncing some letters according to your liturgical tradition (ע and ח) in a way that sets your speech apart from that of Hebrew-speaking Ashkenazim, but change the way you pronounce other letters (eg. ק and ט)? Especially considering that ط did not have the variations in pronunciation that ق had for Arabic-speakers.Furthermore, if they were influenced by the pronunciation of their native dialects, we'd expect to find the Hebrew letter ק pronounced variously as a glottal stop, [g], etc., but that doesn't seem to have been the case. Also, it wouldn't explain why no one pronounced the ט pharyngeally despite the presence of ط in Arabic which is realized pharyngeally regardless of dialect.
Would it really though? Just because some traits transfer, does it necessarily extend to all traits?
n8an wrote:I am going to be a big annoying nerd, since I have all this free time in quarantine, and ask my Israeli (Mizrahi) friends to record themselves saying some words in Hebrew with ח and ע to see how prevalent the pharyngeals are. I'll be back in a day (or maybe a few) when I get responses.
Golv wrote:beside perhaps a marginal number of incredibly old people, I have never met a person who pronounced ח or ע.
Golv wrote:I grew up in a predominantly Mizrahi town (mainly Moroccan, but all groups were represented).
I had Mizrahi teachers, Mizrahi neighbours and Mizrahi friends, and beside perhaps a marginal number of incredibly old people, I have never met a person who pronounced ח or ע.
On the durability of of ח and ע as opposed to other phonemes - As far as I know these sounds still characterized
the Hebrew of Sephardic Jews, whose pronunciation of Hebrew was considered prestigious.
Whether true, at least for a while ח and ע were selectively endorsed by radio while much of the Semitic phoneme inventory was ignored.
Up to the 60's it was possible to hear ח and ע on radio, and much later still by some radio presenters who took pride in their ability to reproduce Sephardic pronunciation (Dan Caner is a famous example).
By the time Hebrew television came to be, ח and ע were dropped as well.
eskandar wrote:But all of that was true of Hebrew as well for the Arabic-speaking Jews we're discussing here, at least until after 1948. The point is that for the first generation of Hebrew learners from Arabic-speaking backgrounds, both Hebrew and standard Arabic were at one point learned second languages you didn't speak in everyday life. They pronounced ق as [q] when reading Arabic, and may have pronounced ק as [q] when praying in Hebrew, so I think it's not so simple as to say that "they didn't have [q] in their spoken dialect so they didn't use it when speaking Hebrew." Again, to me it seems there's more to the story.
Cool! Though I wouldn't be surprised if your friends reply with bog-standard Israeli Hebrew pronunciations, depending on the context in which you ask them. As far as I understand, native Hebrew speakers tend to use the pharyngeals in situations where they want to emphasize their Mizrahi identity.
So they might not necessarily use the pharyngeals with you, but that wouldn't necessarily mean they never use them at all. Will be curious to see what kind of responses you get!
I've heard these pronunciations plenty of times in Tel Aviv, though exclusively from fairly old people. I was always listening actively for the pharyngeals since it's something that interests me, so I might have noticed it more often than people who aren't paying attention to phonetics.
n8an wrote:I just don't think q is part of how people are taught Hebrew at all. At least we know that ח and ע were traditionally pronounced pharyngeally; but I honestly doubt that 99% of Hebrew speakers know that ק was once pronounced with a q. It's like...not a thing.
Of course, I can't go back in time and explain how it was taught in the early 20th century or whatever, but the fact that most Hebrew speakers know ח and ע but I don't think anyone knows about q really does say something to me.
ת is kind of known to have a "th" pronunciation or "s" pronunciation amongst some old people
The results were as I expected
I have seen this on TV many times and in real life, when I tell my Israeli friends about my Arab friends and they invariably laugh at me for saying A7mad and Mo7ammad, saying I sound hilarious and should pronounce it "normally" like "akhmed" and "mokhammad".
HOLD ON - you went to Israeli when? Sorry for getting sidetracked, but I DID NOT KNOW THIS! Omg! When?
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 5 guests