Antirri wrote:
I agree. Hebrew phonology got all the fun sucked out of it, but I guess that's just a side-effect of the language revival process. Too bad it's rather late in the process to make a statement and reintroduce all the lost consonants. I wonder, though, if the process of losing pharyngeals and pharyngealized consonants wasn't already well on its way even in Mishnaic times, because the Wikipedia article mentions that א and ע were occasionally confused.
Probably depends on the dialect, I'd say. Samaritan Hebrew, for example, is well-know for having lost the laryngeals-gutturals, or /?\/, /X\/, /?/, and /h/ (merged into /?/), likely under influence from Samaritan Aramaic, which had the same development. Babylonian Mishnaic Hebrew also likely had some dialectal mergers, again probably under influence from Eastern Aramaic (which merged the gutturals under influence from Babylonian Akkadian, for example, Mandaic). Keep in mind that in places where Hebrew was spoken during this period, it was often a learned language, while some form of Aramaic or another local language was the mother tongue, or at least a co-primary language. Koine Greek also influenced the dialects of certain areas to lose the laryngeals. The Talmud, in Megillah 24b, references that some of the Galilean dialects did not distinguish between the laryngeals. The pharyngealized consonants on the other hand (/t_?\/, /q~k_?\/, and /s_?\/), are typically retained longer, with Akkadian, Eastern Aramaic, and Samaritan Hebrew for example, all preserving them to varying degrees.
Antirri wrote:Also, Hebrew borrowed words from Greek and Latin with pharyngeals stops ט and ק instead of plain ת and כ, although this could just be to avoid spirantization...
This is nothing special. Most Semitic languages historically borrowed non-Semitic words with t, k, and p-like sounds (varying s-like too) and used empathics to render them. In the case of Hebrew and Aramaic, one could say this is due to the intervocalic spirantization of the stops, but the fact that Arabic and Ge`ez do the same thing with Greek words (and do not have intervocalic spirantization) points to a broad systematic usage, IMO, with the spirantization being secondary. Most of the time, this seems to be related to the fact that these borrowed words usually have unaspirated stops, which probably sounded closer to the empathics than the regular or voiced series. Certain varieties of Hebrew even innovated an emphatic /p/ (written with a flipped pe) to spell Greek words with an unaspirated /p/. Ge`ez, on the other hand, has a very unusual (for Semitic languages) three voiceless labial phonemes, /f/, /p/, and /p'/. The latter two are usually used in borrowed words, but there are a few rare words which contain them that are unlikely to be borrowed.
