Yemenite Hebrew - Distinguishing Features

Distinguishing Features

• There are double pronunciations for all six bəgadkəpat letters: gímel without dāḡēš is pronounced غ /ɣ/ like Arabic ġayn, and dāleṯ without dāḡēš is pronounced ذ /ð/ as in "this".
• The pronunciation of tāv without dāḡēš as ث /θ/ as in "thick" is shared with other Mizrahi Hebrew dialects such as Iraqi.
• Vāv is pronounced /w/ as in Iraqi Hebrew and as و in Arabic.
• Emphatic and guttural letters have the same sounds as in Arabic, so ḥêṯ ح = ח /ħ/ and ʻáyin ע is ع /ʕ/.
• There is no distinction between the vowels paṯaḥ, səḡôl and šəwâ nāʻ, all being pronounced /æ(ː)/ like Arabic fatḥa (this feature may reflect Arabic influence, but is also found in old Babylonian Hebrew, where a single symbol was used for all three).
• Šəwâ nāʻ follows Tiberian conventions: /i/ before yôḏ, assimilated to the vowel of a following guttural consonant (ʼālep̄, hê, ḥêṯ, ʻáyin), and /æ/ elsewhere.
• Qāmeṣ gāḏôl is pronounced /ɔː/, as in Ashkenazi Hebrew.
• Final hê with mappîq (a dot in the centre) has a stronger sound than hê generally.
• A semivocalic sound is heard before paṯaḥ gānûḇ (paṯaḥ coming between a long vowel and a final guttural): thus rûaḥ (spirit) sounds like rúwwaḥ and sîaḥ (speech) sounds like síyyaḥ. (This is shared with other Mizrahi pronunciations, such as the Syrian.)

Yemenite pronunciation is not uniform, and Morag has distinguished five sub-dialects, of which the best known is probably Sana'ani, originally spoken by Jews in and around Sana'a. Roughly, the points of difference are as follows:

• In some dialects, ḥōlem (long "o" in modern Hebrew) is pronounced /øː/ (anywhere from non-rhotic English "er" to German o-umlaut), while in others it is pronounced /eː/ like ṣêrệ. (This last pronunciation is shared with Lithuanian Jews.)
• In some dialects, gímel with dāḡēš is pronounced like English "j" /dʒ/, and qôp̄ is pronounced /ɡ/. In others, gímel with dāḡēš is /ɡ/, and qôp̄ is Classical Arabic uvular ق /q/. (This reflects the difference between the Sana'ani and Adeni dialects of Yemeni Arabic.)
• Some dialects (e.g. Sharab) do not differentiate between bêṯ with dāḡēš and without. This is in accordance with most of Mizrahi Hebrew.
• Sana'ani Hebrew primarily places stress on the penultimate syllable, as in Ashkenazi Hebrew.