Yemenite Hebrew

Yemenite Hebrew has been studied by language scholars, many of whom believe it retains older phonetic and grammatical features lost elsewhere.

[5] As late as 937, Jacob Qirqisani wrote: "The biblical readings which are wide-spread in Yemen are in the Babylonian tradition.

The following chart shows the seven vowel paradigms found in the Babylonian supralinear punctuation, which are reflected to this day by the Yemenite pronunciation of Biblical lections and liturgies, though they now use the Tiberian symbols.

Roughly, the points of difference are as follows: Yemenite reading practices continue the orthographic conventions of the early grammarians, such as Abraham ibn Ezra and Aaron Ben-Asher.

The feature varies by dialect: Some see the assimilation of the two vowels as a local variant within the wider Babylonian family, which the Yemenites happened to follow.

[23] They still read the biblical lections and liturgies according to what is prescribed for Hebrew grammar and are meticulous to pronounce the mobile šĕwā שוא נע‎ in each of its changing forms.

"[24] On the mobile šĕwā and its usage amongst Yemenite Jews, Israeli grammarian Shelomo Morag wrote:[25] "The pronunciation of the šĕwā mobile preceding א, ה, ח, ע, or ר in the Yemenite tradition is realized in accordance with the vowel following the guttural; quantitatively, however, this is an ultra-short vowel.

Other examples of words of the mobile šĕwā in the same word taking the phonetic sound of the vowel assigned to the adjacent guttural letter[26] or of a mobile šĕwā before the letter yod (י) taking the phonetic sound of the yod, can be seen in the following: מִזְמוֹר שִׁיר לְיוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת.

לְהַגִּיד בַּבֹּקֶר חַסְדֶּךָ וֶאֱמוּנָתְךָ בַּלֵּילוֹת‎ (vs. 1) liyöm – (vs. 2) lohödöth – (vs. 3) lahaǧīd The above rule applies only to when one of the four guttural letters (אחהע), or a yod (י) or a resh (ר) follows the mobile šĕwā, but it does not apply to the other letters; then, the mobile šĕwā is always read as a short-sounding pataḥ.

Geographically isolated for centuries, the Yemenite Jews constituted a peculiar phenomenon within Diaspora Jewry.

The Yemenite reading traditions of the Bible are now based on the Tiberian text and vocalization,[27] as proofread by the masorete, Aaron ben Asher, with the one exception that the vowel sǝġūl is pronounced as a pataḥ, since the sǝġūl did not exist in the Babylonian orthographic tradition to which the Jews of Yemen had previously been accustomed.

In the first case, archaeologist Benjamin Mazar was the first to discover its linguistic usage in the funerary epigrams of the 3rd and 4th-century CE, during excavations at the catacombs in Beit She'arim (Roman-era Jewish village).

"[28][29] In the latter case, the Jerusalem Talmud occasionally brings down the word גברא in plene scriptum, גוברייא (pl.

Berakhot), uses yod as the mater lectionis to show the vowel hiriq, after the qoph (ק) in Qiryat Shema (Hebrew: קִירְיַת שְׁמַע).

[32] The editor of the critical edition, A. Israel, who places its composition in Babylonia, notes that "linguists would take an interest" in Yehudai Gaon's variant spellings of words, where especially the matres lectionis is used in place of vowels, "represented either by a plene alef (א), waw (ו), and yod (י).

"[33] The use of the matres lectionis in place of the vowel hiriq in the construct case of the words קִרְיַת שְׁמַע ("recital of Shemaʻ" = קירית שמע) reflects apparently the Babylonian tradition of pronunciation, and, today, the same tradition is mirrored in the Yemenite pronunciation of Qiryat shemaʻ.

In the Yemenite tradition, the plural endings on the words זָכִיּוֹת (merits), מַלְכִיּוֹת (kingdoms), גָּלִיּוֹת (exiles), טעִיּוֹת (errors), טרפִיּוֹת (defective animals) and עֵדִיּוֹת (testimonies), all differ from the way they are vocalized in Modern Hebrew.

Although the word Hebrew: מַלְכֻיוֹת (kingdoms) in Daniel 8:22 is vocalized malkhuyoth, as it is in Modern Hebrew, Shelomo Morag thinks that the Yemenite tradition reflects a phonological phenomenon known as dissimilation, whereby similar consonants or vowels in a word become less similar.

However, the same roots applied to different meters, serving as gerunds, as in "slicing/cutting" [meat] and "peeling" [an apple], the words would respectively be חֲתִיכָה (ḥăṯīḫah) and קליפָה (qǝlīfah), without a dagesh in the Hebrew characters Kaph and Pe (i.e. rafe letters), such as when the verb is used with the preposition "after": e.g. "after peeling the apple" = אחרי קליפת התפוח, or "after cutting the meat" = אחרי חתיכת הבשר.

The use of the phoneme "ṣerê", represented by the two dots "◌ֵ", instead of "pataḥ-səġūl" ( ֶ ) for the word "Yavneh" may have been influenced by the Palestinian dialect spoken in the Land of Israel in the 1st-century CE.

In Yemenite tradition, many words in both Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew which are written with the final hê ending (without the mappîq) are realized by a secondary glottal stop, meaning, they are abruptly cut short, as when one holds his breath.

The practical implication arising from this rule is that when there is a noun beginning with a ḥaṭaf pataḥ, as in the word, חֲבִרְתָּהּ ⇒ "her companion", and one wishes to add thereto the preposition "to" – as in, "to her companion" ⇒ לַחֲבִרְתָּהּ, the lamed is written with the vowel pataḥ, instead of a shǝwa (i.e. a mobile shǝwa), seeing that the shǝwa at the beginning of a word and the ḥaṭaf pataḥ, as well as the ḥaṭaf sǝġūl, are all actually one and the same vowel (in the Babylonian tradition), and it is as though he had written two shǝwas one after the other.

Likewise, in the possessive case, "belonging to her companion" ⇒ שֶׁלַּחֲבִרְתָּהּ, the lamed in the preposition של is written with the vowel pataḥ.

[190] The weekly biblical lection read on Sabbath days is called by the name seder (Hebrew: סדר), since the word parashah (Hebrew: פרשה) has a completely different meaning, denoting a Bible Codex containing the first Five Books of Moses (plural: codices = פרשיות).

[191] Charity; alms (Hebrew: מִצְוָה, miṣwoː), so-called in Yemenite Jewish parlance,[192] was usually in the form of bread, collected in baskets each Friday before the Sabbath by those appointed over this task for distribution among the needy, without them being brought to shame.

In contrast, the word צדקה amongst Jews in Sana’a was a tax levied upon Jewish householders, particularly those whose professions were butchers, and which tax consisted of hides and suet from butchered animals, and which things were sold on a daily basis by the Treasurer, and the money accruing from the sale committed to the public fund for the Jewish poor of the city, which money was distributed to the city's poor twice a year; once on Passover, and once on Sukkot.

[196] The following story is related about this instrument in Midrash Rabba: "Rabban [Shimon] Gamliel says: ‘Five-hundred schools were in Beter, while the smallest of them wasn’t less than three-hundred children.