chronic.linguist

In class last week we read a review from a Hebrew newspaper of a book about common Israeli spices. “סיפורי תבלין” (Spice Stories) delves into the history and folklore of each plant—noting, for example, that the Egyptians believed that eating coriander would cause them to give birth to sons. So for our writing assignment on the mythology or folklore behind a plant, I wrote about the mandrake in the world of Harry Potter. Little did I know that my professor would come back the next day with a passage from the Bible (Genesis 30:14-16) which suggests that the mandrake was prized among our foremothers. So much so that they led to the birth of Isaachar. Mandrakes are also intertwined with sensual imagery in Song of Songs: “The mandrakes give a smell, and at our gates [are] all manner of pleasant [fruits], new and old, [which] I have laid up for thee, O my beloved” (7:13). The Wikipedia article claims that the Hebrew word means “love plant”—indeed, דוד (from which דודא probably derives) means “lover.” Perhaps J.K. Rowling would have been better advised to plant (har) the Mandrake in Half-Blood Prince .

Today I began listening to the CD we were given in Hebrew class featuring folkloric tales. The man reading the stories is of a curious dialect—or so I thought, until I checked the IPA Handbook’s entry for Hebrew. Unlike my teacher and most Israelis, he speaks with what the Handbook terms the Oriental pronunciation, “usually spoken by people with a Near Eastern origin, who have some sort of Arabic or Aramaic in their own or their parents’ backround. These speakers may have been born in Israel, and by now most of them do not know any Arabic or Aramaic.” The two sounds that immediately alerted me to his dialect:

• He pronounces /ch/ (ח) as the voiceless pharyngeal fricative [ħ]. I thought the typical pronunciation was [x], but the IPA Handbook lists [χ].
• He pronounces /r/ (ר) as [r]; most Israelis, I believe, use the uvular fricative [ʁ] (or sometimes the uvular trill [ʀ]). For whatever reason, the IPA Handbook lists [r] for both dialects.

Update (May 30, 2006): Added link above to the website for the Handbook, which provides the audio to the examples given in the text. This audio clearly corresponds to their transcriptions—in contrast to the pronunciations of my two Hebrew professors, what I’ve heard of Israeli TV/radio, and Wikipedia’s description—so my guess is that the pronunciation of the speaker chosen for the Handbook isn’t representative of Standard Hebrew as it is most widely spoken today. If you have no idea what the IPA or all these crazy symbols are, Wikipedia is your friend.