In the Sephardic Hebrew, these were "a", "e" and "o" respectively. In some Ashkenazi dialects, kamatz could be pronounced as "u", tzere as "ai" and cholam as "ei". The vowels that were historically long ( kamatz gadol, tzere, cholam) in Ashkenazi Hebrew are pronounced as "o", "ei" and "oi" respectively: דָוִד dovid "David", ספר seifer "book", מֹשֶׁה moishe "Moses".In the Sephardi Hebrew and in modern Israeli Hebrew it is always pronounced as "t": Tora, nachat. The letter ת is pronounced as "t" if it has a dagesh in it: תּוֹרָה toyro "Torah", and as "s" if it doesn't has a dagesh: נַחַת nachas pleasure.The main differences between the Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation and modern Israeli pronunciation (which closely follows the Sephardic one) are: Sephardi Hebrew was developed by the Jews that lived in Spain until they were expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella in the 15th century and then spread across the Mediterranean, including North Africa, the Balkans and Turkey. In their day-to-day speech, they used Yiddish, which originated as a Germanic dialect and was heavily influenced by Ashkenazi Hebrew. In this post, we will focus on the two styles that had the strongest influence on the revived language of Israel, the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Hebrew.Īshkenazi Hebrew was spoken by the Jews that historically lived in Germany and later spread throughout Eastern Europe. Likewise, the ק sound was different from the כּ sound (and these sounds are different in other Semitic languages, including Arabic, and in some Jewish liturgical pronunciations, for example, among Georgian Jews) and the ח sound was different from the ך sound (and these two sounds are still different in Yemenite and some other Mizrachi communities).Īs the Jews were dispersed across the continents, each group of Jews in the diaspora evolved its own style of reading the Tanach, the Talmud and other religious texts they inherited. For example, while in the modern Israeli Hebrew, tzere ( אֵ), segol ( אֶ), chataf-segol ( אֱ) and shva ( מְ) are all pronounced as "e" (although tzere is sometimes pronounced as "ei", and shva is omitted or pronounced differently in some cases), in the 1st millennium's Tiberias the sounds they denoted were distinct. At that time, different letters and vowel signs denoted (with some reservations) different sounds. It is presumed to reflect the pronunciation of Hebrew as it existed in that place at that time. In 7–10th centuries CE several systems of vowel pointing ( נִקּוּד ~ ניקוד nik ud) were created by scholars called Masoretes that system that is used today in religious texts and children's books was created in Tveria and is thus called Tiberian vocalization. It's difficult to reconstruct the pronunciation that was in the Biblical times. For example, in Israel, Saturday (except if you are in a synagogue) is uniformly called שַׁבָּת shab at, but in the speech of American Jews, you can often hear sh abbos. Even though in the revived Israeli Hebrew, there is a more or less consistent standard of pronunciation, the Jews from different countries brought their own language traditions with them, and there are several pronunciation traditions that remain relevant to this day. Hebrew has been used as a language of prayer and literature for millennia, and its reading and pronunciation traditions have evolved with history.
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