Sephardi Hebrew Totally Explained

Everything about Sephardic Dialect totally explained

Sephardi Hebrew is the pronunciation system for Biblical Hebrew favored for liturgical use by Sephardi Jewish practice. Its phonology was influenced by contact languages such as Ladino, Portuguese, Persian, Dutch and Arabic.

Phonology of Sephardi Hebrew

There is some variation between the various forms of Sephardi Hebrew, but the following generalisations may be made.

The stress tends to fall on the last syllable wherever this is the case in Biblical Hebrew
Some attempt is made to pronounce "ayin", though this varies between communities
"Resh" is invariably trilled (like Spanish r), rather than uvular (like French r)
/t/ and /d/ are more often realized as dental plosives rather than alveolar.
There is always a phonetic distinction between (thav) and (samekh)
The Sephardi dialects observe the Kimhian five-vowel system (a e i o u), either with or without distinctions of vowel length: that's
- Tsere represents /eː/, not /ei/
- Holam represents /oː/, not /au/ or /oi/
- Kamats gadol represents /aː/, not /o/

This last difference is the standard shibboleth for distinguishing Sephardi from Ashkenazi (and Yemenite) Hebrew. The differentiation between kamats gadol and kamats katan is made according to purely phonetic rules without regard to etymology, which occasionally leads to spelling pronunciations at variance with the rules laid down in Biblical Hebrew grammar books. For example, כָל (all), when unhyphenated, is pronounced "kal" rather than "kol" (in "kal 'atsmotai" and "Kal Nidre"), and צָהֳרַיִם (noon) is pronounced "tsahorayim" rather than "tsohorayim". This feature is also found in Mizrahi Hebrew, but isn't found in Israeli Hebrew. It is represented in the transliteration of proper names in the Authorised Version, such as "Naomi", "Aholah" and "Aholibah".
Unlike Mizrahi Hebrew, Sephardi Hebrew doesn't generally differentiate emphatic consonants such as "hhet", "tet" and "qof" from "chaf", "tav" and "kaf". Also "vav" is pronounced /v/, not /w/ as in Iraqi and Yemenite Hebrew.

Variants

Sephardim differ on the pronunciation of bet raphe (bet without dagesh). Moroccan, Greek, Turkish, Balkan and Jerusalem Sephardim usually pronounce it as /v/, and this is reflected in modern Hebrew. Spanish and Portuguese Jews traditionally pronounced it as /b/ (as do most Mizrahi Jews), though this is declining under the influence of Israeli Hebrew.
This may reflect changes in the pronunciation of Spanish. In medieval Spanish (and in Ladino), b and v were separate phonemes, with the same sounds as in English. In Renaissance and modern Spanish, the sounds of the two letters have assimilated, and both are pronounced as /β/ (bilabial v) when following a vowel and as /b/ otherwise. For this reason, Jews from Spanish-speaking countries in South America, including Ashkenazim, tend to reflect this rule in their pronunciation of Hebrew, and in Israel are sometimes taken for Sephardim for this reason.
There is also a difference in the pronunciation of tav raphe (tav without dagesh) .

The normal Sephardi pronunciation (reflected in modern Israeli Hebrew) is as an unvoiced dental plosive (/t/);

Greek Sephardim (like some Mizrahi Jews, for example Iraqis and Yemenites) pronounced it as a voiceless dental fricative (/θ/);

Some Spanish and Portuguese Jews and Sephardim from the Spanish-Moroccan tradition, and some Italian Jews, pronounce it as a voiced dental plosive (/d/) or fricative (/ð/).

History

There have been several theories on the origins of the different Hebrew reading traditions. Leopold Zunz believed that the Ashkenazi pronunciation was derived from that of Palestine in Geonic times, while the Sephardi pronunciation was derived from that of Babylonia. This theory was supported by the fact that, in some respects, Ashkenazi Hebrew resembles the western dialect of Syriac while Sephardi Hebrew resembles the eastern. Ashkenazi Hebrew in its written form also resembles Palestinian Hebrew in its tendency to male spellings (see Mater lectionis).
   Others believed that the distinction is more ancient, and represents the distinction between the Judaean and Galilean dialects of Hebrew in Mishnaic times, with the Sephardi pronunciation being derived from Judaean and the Ashkenazi from Galilean. This theory is supported by the fact that Ashkenazi Hebrew, like Samaritan Hebrew, has lost the distinct sounds of many of the guttural letters, while there are references in the Talmud to this as a feature of Galilean speech. Zimmels believed that the Ashkenazi pronunciation arose in late medieval Europe and that the pronunciation prevailing in France and Germany in the time of the Tosafists was similar to the Sephardic. His evidence for this was the fact that Asher ben Jehiel, a German who became chief rabbi of Toledo, never refers to any difference of pronunciation, though he's normally very sensitive to differences between the two communities.
   In Geonic times there were three distinct systems for denoting vowels and other details of pronunciation in Biblical and liturgical texts. One was the Babylonian; another was the Palestinian; the third was the Tiberian, which eventually superseded the other two. Of these, the Palestinian provides the best fit to the current Sephardi pronunciation: for example it doesn't distinguish between patach and qamatz, or between segol and tzere. (Similarly, the Babylonian system appears to fit the Yemenite pronunciation.) The Tiberian system doesn't quite fit any pronunciation in use today, though the underlying pronunciation has been reconstructed by modern scholars: see Tiberian Hebrew. (A variant of the Tiberian notation was used by Ashkenazim, before being superseded by the standard version.)
   The accepted rules of Hebrew grammar, including the current Sephardic pronunciation, were laid down in medieval Spain by grammarians such as Judah ben David Hayyuj and Jonah ibn Janah. By then the Tiberian notation was universally used, though it wasn't always reflected in pronunciation. The Spanish grammarians accepted the rules laid down by the Tiberian Masoretes, with the following variations.

The traditional Sephardic pronunciation of the vowels (inherited, as it seems, from the old Palestinian system) was perpetuated. Their failure to fit the Tiberian notation was rationalized by the theory that the distinctions between Tiberian symbols represented differences of length rather than quality: thus patach was short a, qamatz was long a, segol was short e and tzere was long e.

The theory of long and short vowels was also used to adapt Hebrew to the rules of Arabic poetic metre. For example, in Arabic (and Persian) poetry, when a long vowel is followed by two consonants an extra (short) syllable is treated as present for metrical purposes, though not represented in pronunciation. Similarly in Sephardic Hebrew a sheva following a syllable with a long vowel is invariably treated as vocal. (In Tiberian Hebrew this is only true when the long vowel is marked with meteg.) Further differences from the Tiberian system are:

Vocal sheva is now invariably pronounced as /e/, though the older rules (as in the Tiberian system) were more complicated.

Resh is invariably pronounced as a "front" alveolar trill; in the Tiberian system the pronunciation appears to have varied with the context, so that it was treated as a letter with a double (sometimes triple) pronunciation. In brief, Sephardi Hebrew is a cross between the Tiberian and Palestinian traditions, further influenced by the pronunciation of Arabic, Spanish and Ladino.

Influence on Israeli Hebrew

When Eliezer ben Yehuda drafted his Standard Hebrew language, he based it on Sephardi Hebrew, both because this was the de facto spoken form as a lingua franca in the land of Israel and because he believed it to be most beautiful of the Hebrew dialects. However, the phonology of Modern Hebrew is in some respects constrained to that of Ashkenazi Hebrew, including the elimination of pharyngeal articulation and the conversion of /r/ from an alveolar flap to a voiced uvular fricative.

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