Re: Closed caption fun

Robert Lieblich <r_s_lieblich@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:

Robert Lieblich <r_s_lieblich@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Hebrew, like Arabic, has two different "K"-like sounds, each
assigned to a different Hebrew letter but both represented in
English by K (or sometimes Q without a U following, as in Qatar. I
was taught to pronounce both letters as standard English K, and to
this day I cannot so much as hear, let alone reproduce, the
differences.

Next thing you're going to say is that you can't hear or reproduce
the difference between aleph and ayin, either.

I wasn't taught it, don't know it, and can't reproduce it.[1]

You were probably taught (as are most native speakers, I understand)
that they are "silent letters" rather than the first being a glottal
stop and the second a pharyngeal fricative.

I don't think that qoph and kaph are distinguished in Hebrew by
many speakers these days. Qoph used to be (and still is for some
speakers) a uvular stop.

Yeah, Hebrew speakers are almost as lazy these days as English
speakers.

Yup. Lose a distinction for a thousand years or so and you almost
forget that it's supposed to be there. (I believe that both these
distinctions were gone for Central European speakers by the time
Yiddish got established as a language.)

There have been a lot of other mergers in Hebrew over the years, too.
Vav moved from /w/ to /v/ and became identical to vet. Tet and tav
became merged. Samekh and sin (and, for Ashkenazi speakers, tav) got
merged. Kamatz and patach got merged. Having grown up with people
who learned Ashkenazi Hebrew, both the lack of merger of tav (sav) and
the merger of kamatz and patach still occasionally sound weird to me.

--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
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kirshenbaum@xxxxxxxxxx
(650)857-7572

http://www.kirshenbaum.net/


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