Lethargic Man (anag.) - Ashkenazi pronunciation

Date:	2008-03-30 18:42
Subject:	Ashkenazi pronunciation
Security:	Public

I was thinking in shul yesterday about the Ashkenazi pronunciation of Hebrew, and how, outside of the Chareidi community, it's rare to come across it nowadays, and was struck by how we expect it to be the case. If you stop and think about it, though, the implications are startling: Can anyone here think of any other case where a community the best part of ten million strong, has, over the course of just half a century, en masse abandoned the pronunciation it had been using for its liturgical language for six centuries—let alone a case where the community abandoned it so for a pronunciation made up by one man half a century beforehand, and then gone on to regard the historical pronunciation as old-fashioned and unattractive?

It truly is a remarkable phenomenon—and yet we all take it for granted nowadays!

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User:	karen2205
Date:	2008-03-30 18:00 (UTC)
Subject:	(no subject)

I've come across the Chareidi community via work and can't pronounce Chareidi nor link the written word with the spoken one.

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User:	lethargic_man
Date:	2008-03-30 18:16 (UTC)
Subject:	(no subject)
Keyword:	beardy

Well, the word means "those who tremble" [sc., before G-d], so you could call them Quakers. ;^) (A term as gleefully inappropriate as calling the Almohads (Al-Muwaḥhidūn), the Islamic fundamentalists who overran Spain and North Africa in the twelfth century, Unitarians.)

Alternatively, you could just call them (the Chareidim) the ultra-Orthodox.

Edited at 2008-03-30 06:16 pm (UTC)

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User:	pseudomonas
Date:	2008-03-31 10:41 (UTC)
Subject:	(no subject)
Keyword:	moo

Pronunciation: the initial phoneme is somewhere between an aspirated H and a guttural kh, depending on what system you're using; a normal h is pretty acceptable. The first vowel is as in "cut".
The stress is on the second syllable, at least that's where I'd shove it. Rhymes fairly closely with "lady".

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User:	darcydodo
Date:	2008-03-31 06:35 (UTC)
Subject:	(no subject)

I have bits of Ashkenazi muddled with bits of Sephardi in my pronunciation.

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User:	lethargic_man
Date:	2008-04-05 20:50 (UTC)
Subject:	(no subject)
Keyword:	green!

You want to hear Ashkenazi mixed with Israeli^*, you should come to my ulpan on Monday. We're doing the הַגָדָה. I use Ashkenazi pronunciation in the religious context, and Israeli pronunciation in the modern Hebrew context; but muddle the two and, much to my chagrin, I get inconsistent. At the Conservative Yeshiva last summer I was studying Gemara^† with an Israeli, and was using the Steinsaltz edition, which includes a commentary in modern Hebrew, and to my horror would find myself sometimes switching pronunciations within a single sentence.

* I suspect you don't mean Sephardi, involving distinguishing כ from ח, and כּ from ק, not to mention א from ע; but the Israeli pronunciation, which is the Sephardi pronunciation watered down to remove the sounds Ashkenazim can't manage.

† Which I of course pronounce /gemɒrrə/ in Yinglish (but would pronounce /gemɒrrɒh/ in Hebrew).

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July 2008