Talk:Modern Hebrew phonology/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

tʃ

@AntonSamuel: What is your basis for characterizing the tʃ in words where prefix -ת precedes a root beginning with ש as a single phoneme? Largoplazo (talk) 00:48, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

This is not something I've argued, the words I mentioned (תשובה, תשוקה, תשע-עשרה) do not have ת as a prefix, ת is part of the root for all three words. AntonSamuel (talk) 00:55, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Are you sure it isn't a prefix, whether inflectional or derivational, in תשובה ("answer", "return") given that it looks awfully convincing that it's derived from the root שוב, "again"?

You're right about תשע, I hadn't looked at it carefully, but, then, just because a [t] and an [ʃ] that used to have a vowel between them no longer do, it doesn't mean they've become a phoneme. What would lead to them being regarded as such? Largoplazo (talk) 01:51, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Yeah now that I've checked again, you were right, only תשע has ת as part of the root. However even though that is the case would it change the status of tʃ as a phoneme? I would argue that tʃ is a phoneme simply since it is used as such, both for foreign words, usually represented by צ' and תש for native words (at least colloquially) like תשמע and תשאל AntonSamuel (talk) 07:42, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

I'm not an expert on where adjacent sounds become treated like phonemes, but I don't think that's correct, that if a language has two phonemes that, when adjacent, create a phonetic sequence that happens to be the same as underlies a third phoneme in the language, then that phonetic sequence is always identified with that third phoneme. For example, in English, which possesses all three of /t/ (usually ⟨t⟩), /ʃ/ (usually ⟨sh⟩), and /t͡ʃ/ (usually ⟨ch⟩ or ⟨tch⟩), would you analyze "hotshot" as /ˈhɑtˌʃɑt/ or as /ˈhɑˌt͡ʃɑt/? Largoplazo (talk) 22:58, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

@Largoplazo: It would be analyzed as /ˈhɑt.ʃɑt/ (General American), and would be pronounced differently from a hypothetical word *hah-chot /ˈhɑ.t͡ʃɑt/ because the /t/ at the end of the syllable would be unreleased or glottalized or even pronounced as a glottal stop, whereas a /t͡ʃ/ at the beginning of a syllable is aspirated. I wonder if there is any such contrast in Hebrew. — Eru·tuon 23:25, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

10 vowel phonemes?

As a native speaker, this seems completely wrong to me. Hebrew might have more than 5 vowel sounds, but not more than 5 vowel phonemes. All of the examples, except the pair ילד,אם, are in pairs of a short "phoneme" on an unstressed syllable and a long "phoneme" (actually the same phoneme) on a stressed syllable, which seems to suggest this is merely about allophonic variations. But even the words ילד and אם have the same /e/ phoneme. To wit, Hebrew speakers learning English generally have difficulty producing the difference between /ɪ/ and /i/ or between /ʊ/ and /u/ (the latter still sounds very subtle to me after many years of hearing English). 87.68.44.49 (talk) 16:47, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

WillRock41 is the one who has recently added 5 more phonemes. The page originally listed only 5 phonemes. He has also made a similar set of changes to Help:IPA for Hebrew (including some changes to the consonants). In both cases he doesn't state where this information comes from, or what pronunciation of Hebrew he is trying to represent. I will post on his talk page asking him to comment here. — Eru·tuon 20:12, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

As a native speaker, I hear some speakers sometimes pronounce /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ as [e] and [o] respectively and the others pronounce /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ as [i] and [u] respectively(similar to Literary Arabic /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ phonemes). In addition Hebrew academy considers vowel length as phonemic feature even length distinction is no longer exist. WillRock41 15:11, 5 December 2014 (UTC +2)

If the pronunciation of some phoneme varies between [e] and [i] in some position, that does not mean that it's a separate phoneme from both /i/ and /e/. I believe it is simply a variation of /i/ on unstressed syllables. I think that when speakers are trying to speak carefully, their pronunciation will be clearly [i] or [e] rather than some intermediate sound (more commonly [i] for more educated speakers, since I think all these cases have Hirik rather than Segol/Tzere).

But more important than what either of us think, which is OR, is the verifiability of the claims. The chart in the article with 5 phonemes is cited. Do you have a citation backing the claim that there are 10 phonemes? RowlfTD (talk) 01:51, 11 December 2014 (UTC) (the unsigned comment that started this thread is also by me)

Wow, yea, I'm just seeing this now. This is completely wrong. Modern Hebrew has only 5 phonemic vowels. Anything else is allophonic although I'm really not sure that's even the right way to analyze it phonetically, I mean the two short vowels becoming a long one. Someone needs to change this back to 5 vowel phonemes. 84.229.127.28 (talk) 13:43, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

תם - טעם mic drop 79.183.87.191 (talk) 15:00, 21 August 2018 (UTC)