[HANASHIR:10354] accents/pronounciation

[erik contzius <contzius...>]

I hate to be the dissenter here, but accents DO make quite a 
difference. It can be the difference of changing a Hebrew verb from 
the past to the future tense. It can change a name from the formal to 
the common (your friend down the street is MO-sheh, but mo-SHEH is 
mo-SHEH rabbEI-nu)... One has to bear in mind that it is difficult 
for the English speaker to relate, since much of English is 
monosyllabic (why is the word monosyllabic so long??), and very few 
words in English have their accent on the last syllable. Hebrew's 
pronounciation  is very germane to its meaning--in English, a 
disfigured pronounciation of a word only makes it sound funny, but in 
Hebrew, the accent can do some serious harm. Unfortunately, I do not 
have the Torah Chanting book by Ely Simon handy (I recommend it to 
everyone, btw), which has some extreme examples of what a wrong 
accent can do. Suffice it to say we either care about the 
pronounciation of a native language and are sensitive to its 
interpretation by a native speaker, or we are not. (I know, I know, 
Israeli's are the worst grammarians... I don't believe it. There are 
plenty of Israeli's I know who care about their language.) The 
difference comes in when you deal with musical styles which were 
influenced by other cultures--specifically yiddish speaking cultures. 
That's how sha-BAT became SHA-bes. Hence, trying to take a piece 
written by carlebach and ammending its accents for the sake of the 
language doesn't work well, since the composer was writing in the 
same style in which he actually spoke the Hebrew (or IV-ris, as he 
might have said). BUT, the naive composer, who learns Hebrew from 
transliteration, has only the excuse that they have not studied, nor 
are sensitive to the nuances of the Hebrew language.

Hebrew is now a living and vibrant language which people are studying 
at the universities, and using in a country--it is not a dead 
language in a vacuum. The more we study it, its grammar, oddities, 
etc., the more we appreciate lashon kodesh (the holy tongue)... I 
guess i'm trying to ask composers who write today to not let the 
melody or rhythm come first in the case of Hebrew--for those of us 
who speak the language, it hurts our ears! (mine, anyway...)

happy day o' turkey once again
cantor erik l. f. contzius
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Other sites of interest:
http://www.kenesethisrael.org/
http://loftrecordings.com/artists/contzius1.htm
http://soundswrite.com/swstore1.html#howexcellent
http://loftrecordings.com/CDs/lrcd1011.htm
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