Help Wanted: Sounds and voices

[Shigawire]

Well, it wasn't "my" comment per se. It was something Dr. Charles Krahmalkov told me, the guy who created the dictionary and grammar books. I've emailed some with him. That's how he explained it to me.

Here's a few direct quotes :

If you wanted a touch of something a bit purer, have your Hebrew speaker use the pronunciation "w" instead of "v" for the letter "waw/vav".

About Hebrew. Hebrew's real name, as recorded in the Bible, is Yehudit, which means "Judean", that is, the Semitic language spoken in the southern highlands of Palestine, from Jerusalem southwards into the desert. Yehudit became the official national language of the Jews about 1000 BC, because it was native language of King David, who was born in Bethlehem of Judah and was for a short while king in Hebron of Judah. The other languages of Palestine continued to be spoken however, chief among them Ephraimite, used in the northern highlands, from Jerusalem up to the Jezreel Valley. We have only a few texts in this once important language, but the Bible preserves a number of interesting stories about it, the most famous of them being the Shibboleth incident: speakers of Yehudit were able to identify Ephraimites by asking them to say the word "shibboleth." In Ephraimite there was no "sh"-sound (as there is none in Greek). The Ephraimite could hear the "sh" but could not articulate it; the best he could do was "sibboleth," giving his tribal identity away and earning an unpleasant death by drowning in the Jordan River. Modern Hebrew is based partly on Biblical Hebrew but also heavily on so-called Mishnaic Hebrew (also called Rabbinic Hebrew). This seems to have been the very ancient, pre-Yehudit language of coastal plain of south-western Palestine. It never really died out but seems to have been pushed aside when Yehudit was declared the national language. Very much like Norwegian could and would not be eliminated when Danish was imposed as the national language of your region. The old Semitic coastal language was really the southernmost dialect of Phoenician, the Semitic spoken along the coast and plain of Lebanon and Palestine. Some features of this coastal language (and therefore also of modern Hebrew) is the pronoun she-("which") instead of Yehudit asher; the pronoun anu ("we") instead of Yehudit anahnu; and the pronoun zo ("this", feminine) instead of Yehudit zot.
Small but significant differences.