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Sephardi Hebrew


Sephardi Hebrew (or Sepharadi 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 Spanish, Ladino, Arabic, Portuguese and Greek.

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

This last difference is the standard shibboleth for distinguishing Sephardi from Ashkenazi (and Yemenite) Hebrew. The differentiation between kamatz gadol and kamatz 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 is not found in Israeli Hebrew. It is represented in the transliteration of proper names in the Authorised Version, such as "Naomi", "Aholah" and "Aholibamah".

Sephardim differ on the pronunciation of bet raphe (ב‎, bet without dagesh). Persian, 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 ~ β] (as do most Mizrahi Jews), though this is declining under the influence of Israeli Hebrew.


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