Al Ha VeDa על הא ודא

Sunday, June 06, 2004

Posted 12:00 AM by Simon

Qamats and Segol are now endangered species.

I am still in shock from this article, maybe because I have never accepted the concept of the "Academy of the Hebrew language" as dictators of what is or isn't correct Hebrew. And my confidence is hardly increased when that last link doesn't work for me and I have to root out the original article from Google cache.

However, my chief astonishment comes from the confident statement that Tsere and Segol are pronounced the same. It just goes to show that native speakers of a language are simply unaware of many of the distinctions that they themselves make when speaking it. Now I come to think of it, I was never aware that the two "l"s in "little" are prononounced differently in English, until someone pointed it out to me.