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.
