Hebrew language

Sounds

Hebrew has two kinds of stress: on the last syllable (milra‘) and on the penultimate syllable (the one preceding the last, mil'el). The former is more frequent. Specific rules connect the location of the stress with the length of the vowels in the last syllable; however due to the fact that Modern Hebrew does not distinguish between long and short vowels, these rules are often ignored in everyday speech. Interestingly enough, the rules that specify the vowel length are different for verbs and nouns, which influences the stress; thus the mil‘el-stressed ókhel (="food") and milra' -stressed okhèl (="eats", masculine) are written in the same way. Little ambiguity exists, however, due to nouns and verbs having incompatible roles in normal sentences. This is, however, also true in English, in, for example, the English word "conduct," in its nominal and verbal forms.

Related Topics:
Stress - Vowel length

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Vowels

The Hebrew word for vowels is tnu'ot.

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Modern Israeli Hebrew has 5 vowel phonemes:

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• /a/ (as in "car")
• /e/ (as in "set")
• /i/ (as in "beak")
• /o/ (as in "horn")
• /u/ (as in "soup")

In Biblical Hebrew, each vowel had three forms: short, long and interrupted (hataf). However, there is no audible distinction between the three in modern Israeli Hebrew.

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Hebrew phonetics include a special feature called schwa. There are two kinds of schwa: resting (nax) and moving (na' ). The resting schwa is pronounced as a brief stop of speech. The moving schwa sounds much like the English "uh".

Related Topics:
Phonetics - Schwa

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Hebrew also has dagesh, a strengthening. There are two kinds of strengthenings: light (qal, known also as dagesh lene) and heavy (xazaq or dagesh fortis). There are two sub-categories of the heavy dagesh: structural heavy (hazaq tavniti) and complementing heavy (hazaq mashlim). The light affects the phonemes /b/ /k/ /p/ in the beginning of a word, or after a resting schwa. Structural heavy emphases belong to certain vowel patterns (mishkalim and binyanim; see the section on grammar below), and correspond originally to doubled consonants. Complementing strengthening is added when vowel assimilation takes place. As mentioned before, the emphasis influences which of a pair of (former) allophones is pronounced. Interestingly enough, historical evidence indicates that /g/, /d/ and /t/ used to have strengthened versions of their own, however they had disappeared from virtually all the spoken dialects of Hebrew. All other consonants except gutturals may receive the heavy emphasis, as well.

Related Topics:
Dagesh - Vowel assimilation - Allophone - Guttural

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One-letter words are always attached to the following word. Such words include: the definite article h (="the"); prepositions b (="in"), m (="from"), l (="to"); conjunctions sh (="that"), k (="as", "like"), v (="and"). The vowel that follows the letter thus attached depends in general on the beginning of the next word and the presence of a definite article which may be swallowed by the one-letter word.

Related Topics:
Article - Preposition - Conjunction

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The rules for the prepositions are complicated and vary with the formality of speech. In most cases they are followed by a moving schwa, and for that reason they are pronounced as be, me and le. In more formal speech, if a preposition is put before a word which begins with a moving schwa, then the preposition takes the vowel /i/ (and the initial consonant is weakened), but in colloquial speech these changes do not occur. For example, colloquial be-kfar (="in a village") becomes bi-khfar. If l or b are followed by the definite article ha, their vowel changes to /a/. Thus *be-ha-matos becomes ba-matos (="in the plane"). However it does not happen to m, therefore me-ha-matos is a valid form, which means "from the plane".

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:* indicates that the given example is not grammatically correct

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Consonants

The Hebrew word for consonants is ‘itsurim (עיצורים).

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/ע/ was once pronounced as a voiced pharyngeal fricative. Modern Ashkenazi (Northern and Eastern European Jews), reading tradition ignores this; however Mizrahi (Middle Eastern and North African Jews) and Israeli Arabs accent these phonemes in a traditional semitic fashion which resembles Arabic `ain ع. Georgian Jews pronounce it as a glottalized g. Western European Sephardim and Dutch Ashkenazim traditionally pronounce it as "ng" in "sing" — a pronunciation which can also be found in the Italki tradition and, historically, in south-west Germany.

Related Topics:
Voiced pharyngeal fricative - Ashkenazi - Mizrahi - Arabic - Sephardim - Italki

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Historical sound changes

Standard (non-Oriental) Israeli Hebrew (SIH) has undergone a number of splits and mergers in its development from Biblical Hebrew {{ref|Hetzron}}.

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• BH /b/ had two allophones, and ; the allophone has merged with /w/ into SIH /v/
• BH /k/ had two allophones, and ; the allophone has merged with /q/ into SIH /k/, while the allophone has merged with {{Unicode|/?/}} into SIH /x/
• BH /t/ and {{Unicode|/?/}} have merged into SIH /t/
• BH {{IPA|/?/}} and {{IPA|/?/}} have merged into SIH {{IPA|/?/}}
• BH /p/ had two allophones, and ; the incorporation of loanwords into Modern Hebrew has probably resulted in a split, so that /p/ and /f/ are separate phonemes