@SethJ Maybe "I always get married during sefira" (?!? Is he Ross?). Though I also really liked "I toivel in the mikvah holding a sheretz" (picturing someone actually doing that, and doing it davka, cracked me up for some reason) and "By my chasunah I had an aveirah tantz". But the whole song is really very good.
@DhoweedYaAgov Aleicham sholem :) I'm sorry I have to drop out now. If you write me something, ping me with @DoubleAA and I'll see it when I return in a little bit.
@msh210 Sure; thanks. I didn't realize their new AJAX-y control doesn't change the URL for you when you ask for Rashi. Better yet, we could edit this reference into your answer.
@IsaacMoses I see no reason to mention in the answer that the amoraim were early ones. That may be of interest to the asker but is not of much general interest AFAICT
@AlUmmatمجاهد I take exception to his most recent comment, which indicates that he's interested in teaching Jews something about our tradition that he hasn't demonstrated exists within it.
@AlUmmatمجاهد His motivations are still fairly transparent. I don't mind his having them, but his questions shouldn't reflect them (it usually makes for a bad question, besides the proselytizing issue). He hasn't come out -- yet -- and explicitly proselytized as he had before. But see @IsaacMoses's chat comment, just above this one.
... and I have voted to close the question there, which is a reprise of a previously-deleted question, and once again, appears to be leading rather than asking
@AlUmmatمجاهد SE's model is unusual on the internet, so I'm not surprised that we (all) get users who expect a forum. How successful have you been in educating the others you've gotten? Our new users usually pick up on this (with help from the communtiy) pretty quickly.
@MonicaCellio ... or don't stick around. We tend to get ~every day hit-and-run "answers" that are actually comments, arguments, or follow-up questions, and most of the time, that's the only contribution of that user
@MonicaCellio Well, those who don't get "scared off" (which to my knowledge aren't very much) are usually the ones who try to get used to the SE model, as for the success rate of educating the new users, I do not know
@AlUmmatمجاهد I'm glad to hear that it hasn't been a big problem for you, but sad to hear that it's on the rise. But I guess the silver lining there is that this sort of thing tends to happen as sites become more visible, so with luck you're attracting productive users at the same time.
@MonicaCellio ok, I don't think I understood your above question, but yes thankfully we are attracting productive users
@msh210 Nation, it can refer to all Muslims, and it can refer to as both Muslims and non-Muslims as a whole, if you want a translation of both names you can say it means "striver of this nation", and I pray I live up to the nickname
Ummat or Ummah can also refer to any of the nations before us, like the Jews were a nation or Ummah before us
@AlUmmatمجاهد oh, sorry -- I thought you did from your answer. :-) I meant to ask how much trouble you have with users who are persistent about not learning how to behave on SE sites, if you see what I mean. Every site gets these from time to time; it sounds like you said you were seeing some of this too but not in huge numbers. Anyway, may we all continue to grow our bases of contributing users!
@AlUmmatمجاهد No, עם, and actually also the differently-rooted אומה, which is pronounced "Uma." I'm not sure if the latter is Biblical, Modern, or something in between. The former is definitely Biblical.
@AlUmmatمجاهد the languages have similar alphabets (yes, Hebrew has alef). Both have a system of roots on which verbs are built (which is strange to thoseused only to Indo-European languages).
@IsaacMoses Ummah or Ummat (أمة) is general and can mean any nation, but when Alef Lam (ال) it will then mean a specific nation, the Alef lam specifies it is known in Arabic as Alef Lam Ata'rifeeyah
ok. @AlUmmatمجاهد -- it seems to me: Arabic hamza is pronounced identically to Hebrew alef. Arabic alef is not pronounced identically to any Hebrew letter. Maybe @SethJ can confirm this or correct me.
I'm guessing then that Arabic ummat is related to Hebrew אומה (though that's merely a guess!).
@msh210 Oy, I can't keep up with this thread at the moment. But when we say "gutteral", we're usually not referring to Alif. Alif is a glottal stop, as you said, but when I think "gutteral", I think 'Ayin.
@SethJ "Guttural" means in/of the throat, and the glottis is definitely in the throat. But maybe "guttural" as applied to sounds doesn't mean "in/of the throat" but has a specialized meaning.
I suggest that the question, as it is, requires no further intervention other than possibly closing it for being leading rather than interrogative. Given that it's been both answered and downvoted already, I think maybe just leaving it be may be best, since it would result in the least additional noise
@msh210 No, it means what you say it means, but, speaking strictly as an amateur whose apex of expertise was six semesters in college, I just think of 'Ayin as the prime example of what "gutteral" means. Ghayin is also gutteral, as is Reish in Israeli Hebrew (same sound as Ghayin, if you're wondering what Ghayin is). I'm just trying to clear up who's talking about what a little bit, as the terms may be confusing.
@msh210 Saying Alif is gutteral, but 'Ayin is more gutteral doesn't help much.
@SethJ I seem to recall some Hebrew textbook I learned from describing a "grammatical" notion of gutteral that's not what we think of with pronunciation. There were, I think, five Hebrew letters in that category - alef, 'ayin, reish, hei, and... not sure. (Chet would seem to fit but I'm guessing.) I don't remember the linguistic logic, though.
@MonicaCellio Yeah, the Hebrew gutterals never seemed very "gutteral" to me. Especially if you consider a Sephardi Reish is almost surely more "correct" than the common Israeli pronunciation. The latter sounds like a carry-over from German immigrants. Chet is the other one. The grammatical rule is that they can't take a Dagesh, but I think it has little to do with their location in the throat.
@AlUmmatمجاهد Depends how you pronounce it. :)
@AlUmmatمجاهد As properly pronounced, it should sound identical to the Arabic 'Ayin.
@SethJ is it definitely vocalized that way? There's that gemara about whether words are spelled with alef or ayin because they're pronounced the same...
@IsaacMoses yep, I'm sure. It goes on for almost a whole blatt, and discusses other letters too. I forget where it is - all I can tell you is that it's in Brachos or Shabbos :)
@yoel Your playing a semantic game with the word correct. It's not very interesting. Moshe and the Jews with him pronounced it only one way. What halacha tells us to do now is a different question.
@yoel @DoubleAA God said zachor and shamor simultaneously. The Tos'fos Y'shenim says that this was in order to pronounce the kamatz, resh, and cholam two different ways so that no one faction of Jews at the time could claim that it had the correct pronunciation.
so, um, I have been following you guys discussion, and I still have a question in my head, if it has been answered please point it out, but my question is, in hebrew, is Alef pronounced like the Ayin?
@yoel I provided a Halachic source that on the particular question of distinguishing between these letters vs. not, there is one answer that's proper for the purposes of leading services.
@yoel Historically, you can ask about how it was spoken at any given point in time by any given populace. Correct and proper are axiological terms, not historical ones.
@yoel I have no reason to think so. The language had been around for a long time by then. Assuming it had been spoken continuously since the time of Adam (which I think is reasonable from a Jewish perspective), it had been spoken for some 2448 years. Modern English is much younger; even Anglo-Saxon, from which it derives, is younger. There's not only one correct way to pronounce English now: far from it.
Even more so, we have learned that Hebrew predates creation, and was in fact the blueprint of creation by way of the Torah
I am therefore highly skeptical that something which is actually beyond our physical existence could possibly have an "originally correct" pronunciation.
@msh210 The consonants in English are almost entirely identical.
@msh210 You are also not accounting for geographic movement and population separation. People living with each other pronounce things the same way.
@yoel It seems very likely that 2.999 million of them did. Or at least recognized that there was a standard and they weren't following it because of various physical problems or historical problems. Just like modern immigrants.
Just so everyone is clear, were talking about whether or not some groups had 11 more consonants than others. And that those without those eleven consonants, had eleven unused letters in their alphabets.
@yoel What is the source for your assertion? Why is the onus on me?
@DoubleAA the gemara in Shabbos where Chazal have to ask how words are spelled - I'm saying Chazal received a mesorah for pronunciation, so if some differentiated and some didn't, both are masoretic.
@DoubleAA I'll have to look it up when I get home to give over more detail, but a few books bring that different regions of origin brought different dialects of certain trade languages that were shared by many in West Africa, and that these differences persisted and manifested themselves in various different ways in America.
@DoubleAA it just seems to me that the plain reading of the gemara is that it's not clear to Chazal whether a word is spelled with ayin or alef, and that therefore they are pronounced the same, while at the same time some obviously do differentiate as brought elsewhere. I am operating under the assumption that Chazal are correct, period. Anything brought in the Gemara is true. Therefore, it is true that ayin and alef are very different AND it is true that they are the same.
@yoel I didn't question whether the Gemara is true. I said, given all the evidence and multiple ways of interpreting a gemara, why choose the other one? Tosfot does this literally all the time.
@yoel I'd expect that such unclarity would be more likely associated with unclarity about the mesora rather than with an authoritative statement thereof.
In Shabbos 77a-77b, Chazal ask about the spelling of a series of words, questioning whether the words are spelled with an alef - as in גראינין - or with an ayin - as in גרעינין. Wasn't ayin vocalized at that time? If so, how could there be a question when the two letters had markedly different ...
@AlUmmatمجاهد, I'm sorry, this must be so frustrating for you. The shortest answer is, there are two major traditions on this. In one tradition the Aleph is pronounced like Arabic Alif or Hamsa, and the 'Ayin is pronounced like 'Ayin. In the other major tradition, the 'Ayin has lost its 'Ayin-ness and sounds identical to Arabic Hamsa, and the Aleph is pronounced like in the first tradition I described.
@DoubleAA I guess the reason I'm pushing so hard for multiple original pronunciations is because it's always bugged me that we have such varied havaros - shouldn't we have heard from our fathers, who heard from theirs, etc.? I have a hard time imagining that at one time everybody said Shema one way and then it somehow started to drift - didn't we hear how they said it?
@yoel As another suggestion, see GG's answer there. Perhaps people didn't use fancy sounds in regular speech and could get confused about unusual words.
@DoubleAA I hear what you're saying but I'm not seeing the direct connection - are you arguing that a majority of Jews, in multiple times and places, completely disconnected from how to pronounce (many aspects of) Hebrew?
@SethJ yeah, I plan to - I want to hash it out a little more here first, though.
@DoubleAA I know, I was so stunned when I learned that the French pronunciation of "knight" in Monty Python and the holy grail was actually historically accurate - "k'nig'et"
I think another key thing is that none of these languages emphasize dikduk as far as I know. We are specifically supposed to pronounce the Shema with exacting correctness
@DoubleAA could be, but I think that the theological considerations are essential to what we're discussing, and they would necessarily (and rightly, for their worldview) not consider those.
@msh210 Could be, but still pretty minor compared to 11 consonant sounds missing.
@yoel Incidentally, you should also be asking why God made multiple letters with the same sound. If He designed an ideal alphabet, why have doubles? And why specifically these ones?
vis-a-vis the gemara in Shabbat: we know whole communities of people didn't pronounce the ayin/alef correctly from Bavli Megillah. Why not assume the rabbis in the gemara in Shabbat were from those communities?
All:
All: I think the question is no longer downvote worthy. — Double AA6 mins ago
@DoubleAA Hebrew is a very weird system from a linguistic point of view. Most languages don't have the math work out that "father + mother = child", for example.
And if you say, the rabbis must have not been part of the communities with mixed up pronunciations, the bavli in megillah has Rebbi Yehuda haNassi "making fun" of Rabbi Chiya who couldn't pronounce a chet properly.
In Hebrew, there is a concept called "gematria", which is, in short, that each letter has a numerical value proceeding linearly through the alphabet, such that א equals 1, ב equals 2, and so on.
This produces many classical commentaries on these numerical values, and there are many theologically...
@yoel I suspect the answer will be "it's by chance and occurs in every language, or in every language with an abjad". Can you show in the question that it occurs more in Hebrew than in other languages with abjads? That'd vastly improve the question IMO.
@msh210 I can't because I don't know anything else about other abjads. Maybe I should generalize it? I'm ready for the "it's coincidence" but that seems so unlikely to me, Occam's razor and all
@DoubleAA all I can say is that it sure doesn't occur in English or Yiddish. My wife says it doesn't occur in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. That's all I've got.
@yoel Really? I've never tried it in English. You've tried giving the English alphabet letters values 1...10...100 etc. and tried lots of permutations?
English isn't an abjad -- it has vowels -- which means finding another word to match (numerically) a word you started with will (it seems to me a priori) be much harder, because the word you're seeking will need to have vowels.
I am a room owner in PHP and occasionally people ask me to delete things. As I understand it, room owners can't and probably never will be able to do that. However, according to http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/87773/170584 I should be able to move messages to another room (such as bin). I have ...
@yoel What is the source for your assertion? Why is the onus on me?
@yoel We've provided three alternate reads for the Gemara in Shabbat. Do you have anyone who says explicitly that multiple pronunciations were around at Har Sinai? (I don't know there isn't such an opinion I've just never heard of it.)
@DoubleAA at Har Sinai, no, but it seems that the Gemara takes for granted that people pronounce things differently depending on region.
My contention is that it would have been impossible for an entire group of Jews to forget how to pronounce Hebrew but remember that they were Jews. Therefore, there must have been extant pronunciations.
If one does not pronounce the Shema correctly, one has not fulfilled their obligation (citation needed). Shouldn't at least the majority have heard it from their father, and on back, with exactly precision? Even if you would say that casual speech is affected by local languages, liturgical Hebr...
אמר ליה רבי חייא לרבי שמעון בר רבי: אלמלי אתה לוי פסול אתה מן הדוכן. משום דעבי קלך. אתא אמר ליה לאבוה. אמר ליה: זיל אימא ליה: כשאתה מגיע אצל +ישעיהו ח'+ וחכיתי לה', לא נמצאת מחרף ומגדף?
And if you say, the rabbis must have not been part of the communities with mixed up pronunciations, the bavli in megillah has Rebbi Yehuda haNassi "making fun" of Rabbi Chiya who couldn't pronounce a chet properly.
The gemara doesn't say that though. Also, a bunch of rishonim note that he could have pronounced it correctly if he tried hard, explaining how in some other gemara he was once a Sha"Tz.
Btw Rashi to Shabbat 103b says that some people write Alefs instead of Ayins (and vice-versa) because they sound similar.
Meaning, he's explaining why the Gemara says some people mix them up.
So that could explain your gemara in Shabbat too. They were clarifying possibly bad 'editions' because they know people sometimes make that mistake.
@yoel No, just explaining why the rabbis were wondering if something should have been an ayin or alef. Because people sometimes made that mistake while writing, and the rabbis came to clarify the correct girsa.
@yoel The rabbis knew to distinguish. They were correcting/clarifying written texts by local scribes, who the rabbis knew made this mistake sometimes because they wreen't careful.
I am a room owner in PHP and occasionally people ask me to delete things. As I understand it, room owners can't and probably never will be able to do that. However, according to http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/87773/170584 I should be able to move messages to another room (such as bin). I have ...
