LL-L "Transliteration" 2003.02.14 (06) [E]

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From: John M. Tait <jmtait at wirhoose.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Transliteration" 2003.02.15 (10) [E]

Ron wrote:

>Ancient/Biblical Hebrew has/had a phoneme inventory very much like that of
>Literary Arabic.  That of Modern Hebrew is comparatively impoverished, due
>to being largely based on Sephardic (Ladino) pronunciation and other
>influences of other European languages, a far cry from the "Semitic type"
>(with which many immigrants from Arabic-speaking countries arrive in Israel
>and for various reasons lose quick-smart).  The orthography is based on the
>old language.  This means that original phonemes are still distinguished
>that in modern pronunciation have coincided.  This includes the phonemes
/θ/
>(/theta/) (ת, letter _thaw_ > mod. pron. [tav], Yiddish [sof]) and /t/
(×~,
>letter _teth_ > mod. pron. [tet], Yiddish [tes]).  As you can see, Yiddish
>distinguishes them as /s/ and /t/ respectively, while they coincided as /t/
>in Ladino.
>
>For "everyday" use, Hebrew tends to be transliterated -- or better to say
>"transcribed" -- on the basis of modern pronunciation.  In Semitic studies
>this is unacceptable, because the Romanization must make all distinctions
>the native script makes.  This also extends to vowel distinctions, many of
>which are lost in Modern Hebrew but to an extent still exist in Yiddish
>(albeit "destorted").
>
>I hope this explained it.

Is the spelling 'Thorah' then simply a transliteration system where Teth is
transcribed as <t> and both dotted and undotted Tau as <th>?

I'm familiar with systems where dotted Tau is transcribed as <t>, undotted
Tau as <th>, and Teth using a diacritic, usually a dot underneath.

In either system, the undotted Tau in 'kashruth' would be transcribed as
<th>.

John M. Tait.

http://www.wirhoose.co.uk

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Transliteration

John Magnus,

I, too, am most familiar with the system you described ("... dotted Tau is
transcribed as <t>, undotted Tau as <th>, and Teth using a diacritic,
usually a dot underneath"), also used for Arabic (Teth sometimes with a
stroke trough a <t>).  I am not sure the other one is real system.  Maybe it
is supposed to generally distinguish Taw and Thaw from Tet in the absence of
a diacritic, given that Thaw rarely if ever occurs initially.  They are all
pronounced the same in the Sephardic (> Modern Hebrew) pronunciation, so
things like this tend to be ignored or taken lightly.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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