Re: Pronunciation Question

[David Fiedler <david...>]

Bill Cornette writes:

>       As a Jew by choice, I don't have the cultural background (but
> then neither does the Jew by birth who prompted this question) to
> understand the difference in pronuciation between Sephardic (and Israeli)
> pronunciation and Ashkenazic pronunciation.  A Jewish friend (non
> practicing, but according to him decended from several rabbis in
> Poland) questioned my use of the word Shabbat, stating that the
> correct pronunciation is Shabbis.  I tried to explain that the
> Sov (last letter in Shabbis) in Ashkenazi Hebrew was a Tov in
> Sephardic Hebrew and the Sephardic Hebrew was the Hebrew used in
> Israel and was becoming/had become (?) the world standard.

You're both right (although it sounds like your friend is a real snob).
Ashkenazically, the correct pronounciation is Shabbis or Shabbas (which
brings up the question of whether my grandparents were speaking Yiddish
or Hebrew when they said Shabbas!), and Sephardically, it's Shabbat. It
always bothered me when -- in recent times only! -- I heard "everyone"
pronouncing it as a tov, as I could *swear* I got a good Jewish
education and hadn't forgotten that much! I hadn't realized I had gotten
a good Ashkenazic education, and everyone else has been going the
Sephardic way. Well, I'm not going to start saying things differently
now, so I will continue to confuse everyone I meet. Meanwhile, I posted
the same question myself to soc.culture.jewish, and finally got a number
of good answers, one of which was this:

 In article <1992Oct10(dot)035516(dot)29038 (at) infopro(dot)com> david (at) 
infopro(dot)com (Dragon [David Fiedler]) writes:
 > last letter of the Hebrew alphabet?
 >2. How is this letter pronounced?
 >3. Was it always pronounced this way?
 >4. If not, when was it changed and why?

   Originally, in the early 1st. millennium B.C. it was always
pronounced as a plain [t] sound (like in English "tip").  Towards the
end of the first millennium, there was a sound change in Hebrew (and
Aramaic) so that [t] (and in fact all the sounds represented by the
six "b (at) ghadhk@phath" letters) changed from stops to fricatives when
after a vowel.  So the last letter of the hebrew alphabet was now
pronounced [th] (as in English "thin") when after a vowel (and not
doubled -- i.e. without _dageh_h.azaq_).  There is no real reason
"why" this sound change occurred; sound changes simply occur in
languages from time to time.

   This distribution of sound variants ("allophones") can still be
observed in a few pronunciation traditions (I think the Yemeni), but
when Hebrew was pronounced by speakers of non-Semitic languages, two
adaptations happened:

  1) In some pronunciations, the post-vowel [th] sound variant was
changed to [s], but the non-post-vocalic [t] sound variant remained
[t].  (This includes "Ashkenazic" or central European pronunciation
traditions.)
  2) In other pronunciation traditions both sound variants were merged
into simple [t].  (Modern Israeli pronunciation follows this pattern.)
--
         --Henry Churchyard     churchh (at) emx(dot)cc(dot)utexas(dot)edu
--
David Fiedler UUCP:infopro!david Internet:david (at) infopro(dot)com or david 
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