Hebrew phonology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hebrew phonology must take into account that the Hebrew language has been used primarily for liturgical, literary, and scholarly purposes for most of the past two millennia. As a consequence, its pronunciation has been strongly influenced by the vernacular of each individual Jewish community. In contrast to the varied development of these pronunciations is the relatively rapid development of modern Israeli Hebrew.

Contents 1 Basic Hebrew alphabet 1.1 Consonants of modern General Israeli Hebrew 1.2 Vowels of modern Israeli Hebrew 2 Stress 3 See also 4 Notes on writing 5 Other Notes

[edit] Basic Hebrew alphabet

See main article Hebrew alphabet

[edit] Consonants of modern General Israeli Hebrew

	Bilabial		Labiodental		Alveolar		Post- alveolar [1]		Palatal	Velar		Uvular		Glottal
Stops	p [2]	b [2]			t	d				k [2]	ɡ			ʔ
Affricates					ts		tʃ	dʒ
Fricatives			f [2]	v [2]	s	z	ʃ	ʒ				χ [2]	ʁ	h
Nasals	m				n
Laterals					l
Approximants									j

Note: dagesh and mapik symbols, the dots in otherwise identical letters, are often omitted in writing. For instance, בּ is often written as ב. The use or omission of such marks is usually consistent throughout any given context.

• א   alef   silent (traditionally, [ʔ] when before a vowel)
• בּ   bet   [b]
• ב   vet   [v] ([b] among Egyptian Jews)
• גּ   gimel   [ɡ] ([dʒ] among some Teimanim)
• ג   ghimel   [ɡ] ([ɣ] among Teimanim, Mizrachim and some Sephardim)
• ’ג   jimel   [dʒ] (used only in loanwords)
• דּ   dalet   [d]
• ד   dhalet   [d] ([ð] among Teimanim, Mizrahim and some Sephardim)
• ה   he   [h], silent in word-final position.
• ו   vav   [v] ([w] among Teimanim and some Mizrahim)
• ז   zayin [z]
• ’ז   zhayin   [ʒ] (used only in loanwords)
• ח   khet   [χ] (ħ among Oriental Hebrew speakers)
• ט   tet   [t] ([t̴] among Teimanim)

• י   yod   [j]
• כּ   kaf   [k]
• ךּ   kaf sofit   [k]
• כ   khaf   [χ]
• ך   khaf sofit   [χ]
• ל   lamed   [l]
• מ   mem   [m]
• ם   mem sofit   [m]
• נ   nun   [n]
• ן   nun sofit   [n]
• ס   samekh   [s]
• ע   ayin   silent, like א ([ʕ] among Oriental Hebrew speakers)

• פּ   pe   [p]
• ףּ   pe sofit  [p]
• פ   fe   [f]
• ף   fe sofit   [f]
• צ   tsadi   [ts]
• ץ   tsadi sofit   [ts]
• ’צ   tshadi   [tʃ] (used only in loanwords) and [dˁ] (used to indicate the Arabic letter Ḍād ض)
• ק   kuf   [k] (pronounced [q] by many Israelis as well as speakers hailing from the Arab world, [g] by some Teimanim)
• ר   resh   [ʁ] ([r] among Oriental Hebrew speakers)
• שׁ   shin   [ʃ]
• שׂ   sin   [s]
• תּ   tav   [t]
• ת   thav   [t] ([θ] among Teimanim, Mizrahim and some Sephardim, [s] by some Ashkenazim)

The sounds /tʃ, dʒ, ʒ/, written 'ז' , ג' , צ, are found in many loanwords that are part of the everyday Hebrew colloquial vocabulary, even among people who don't know the source languages. In addition, there are ways of writing some sounds in words that are truly foreign, not part of Israeli Hebrew:

• ’ד   dhal   [ð] (used to indicate the English "th" as in "this" and the Arabic letter Ḏāl ذ)
• ’ח   kha   [χ] (used to indicate the Arabic letter Ḫāʼ خ)
• ’ט   za   [ðˁ] (used to indicate the Arabic letter Ẓāʼ ظ)
• ’ע   ghayin   [ʁ] (used to indicate the Arabic letter Ġayn غ)
• ’ת   thav   [θ] (used to indicate the English "th" as in "thin and the Arabic letter Ṯā' ث)

[edit] Vowels of modern Israeli Hebrew

Israeli Hebrew has five vowel phonemes, /i e a o u/, but many more written symbols for them:

• ִ   khirik /i/
• ֵ   tsere /e/ (/e/)
• ֶ   segol /e/ (historically /ɛ/)
• ַ   patakh /a/
• ָ   kamats gadol (or just kamats) /a/ (historically /ɔ/)
• ָ   kamats katan /o/ (relatively infrequent)
•    kholam /o/
• ׂ   kholam khaser /o/
• וּ   shuruk /u/
• ֻ   kubuts /u/

Shva

• ְ   shva /e/ (traditionally /ə/) and silent (silent when under a letter at the end of a syllable)
• ֱ   khataf segol /e/
• ֲ   khataf patakh /a/
• ֳ   khataf kamats   /o/

[edit] Stress

Hebrew has two kinds of stress: on the last syllable (milra‘) and on the penultimate syllable (the one preceding the last, mil‘el). The former is more frequent. Specific rules connect the location of the stress with the length of the vowels in the last syllable. However, due to the fact that Israeli Hebrew does not distinguish between long and short vowels, these rules are not evident in everyday speech. They usually cannot be inferred from written text either, since usually vowels are not marked. The rules that specify the vowel length are different for verbs and nouns, which influences the stress; thus the mil‘el-stressed ókhel (="food") and milra‘-stressed okhèl (="eats", masculine) differ only in the length of the vowels (and are written identically if vowels are not marked). Little ambiguity exists, however, due to nouns and verbs having incompatible roles in normal sentences. This is, however, also true in English, in, for example, the English word "conduct," in its nominal and verbal forms.

[edit] See also

• Hebrew alphabet
• Niqqud
• Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Hebrew)

[edit] Notes on writing

1. The phoneme /v/ is represented by two letters: vet (ב, unemphasized bet) and vav (ו). Although modern Hebrew pronunciation does not differentiate between the two, the latter is historically weaker due to its being a semi-vowel (/w/).
2. The phoneme /k/ is represented by two letters: kaf (כ) and quf (ק). Although modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation doesn't differentiate between the two, the latter is pronounced by some speakers as in Arabic /q/.
3. The phoneme /t/ is represented by two letters: tet (ט) and tav (ת). The tet was historically pronounced with pharyngealization (as in Arabic) or as an ejective (often, but misleadingly, called "emphasis"). The letter tav, when intervocalic and non-doubled (i.e. without dagesh) represented a fricative phoneme /θ/. For example, what in Modern Hebrew sounds as "Beit Lexem" was transcribed (through Greek, which is ill-equipped to represent /ħ/) into English from Old Hebrew as "Bethleem", also demonstrating note number 5. The traditional Ashkenazi pronunciation of tau without dagesh as "s" is a continuation of this former distinction.
4. In old Hebrew the צ (/ʦ/) was, like ט, pharyngealized or ejective ("emphasis"). Currently, the only community of Hebrew-speakers which expresses this in speech are Yemenite Jews, whose Hebrew did not lose them, as other communities did under the influence of Yiddish and other European languages); however the emphasis led to several types of phonetic change that still exist. The exact nature of the emphatic feature is a matter of debate; the most commonly suggested possibilities are pharyngealization (as in Arabic) and glottalization (or the ejective mechanism) (as in the Ethiopian Semitic languages).
5. In the speech of most modern Hebrew speakers, the phoneme /χ/ is represented by two letters: het (ח) and khaf (כ). Het is presumed to historically have been a voiceless pharyngeal fricative (like Arabic ح). The voiceless pharyngeal fricative pronunciation [ħ] is found in the speech of many Teimanim, Mizrachim and Sephardim, who, like Ashkenazim, pronounce khaf as /x/.

[edit] Other Notes

1. ^ Postalveolar sounds (with the exception of /ʃ/) are not native to Hebrew, and only found in borrowings.
2. ^ ^{a b c d e f} The pairs (/b/, /v/), (/k/, /x/), (/p/, /f/), written respectively by the letters bet (ב), kaf (כ) and pe (פ) have historically been allophonic. In Modern Hebrew, however, all six sounds are phonemic, due to mergers involving formerly distinct sounds (/v/ merging with /w/, /k/ merging with /q/, /x/ merging with /ħ/), loss of consonant gemination (which formerly distinguished the stop members of the pairs from the fricatives when intervocalic), and the introduction of syllable-initial /f/ through foreign borrowings.