# Questions about Western Ashkenazi Hebrew



## Squee100

1. Is it still used (okay, I know their pronunciation of _chowlom_ is still alive and well)? Apparently Western Yiddish isn't.
2. Are its vowel ranges the same as Eastern Ashkenazi? The paper below seems to suggest otherwise. Are the vowel ranges of WA or EA closer to those of Sephardi Hebrew?

http://dovidkatz.net/dovid/PDFLinguistics/1993b.pdf


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## Drink

Squee100 said:


> 1. Is it still used (okay, I know their pronunciation of _chowlom_ is still alive and well)? Apparently Western Yiddish isn't.



I've personally never heard it fully, but I do believe it still exists in certain communities. I also think it influenced the typical Jewish American English pronunciation of the cholam as the English long-O.



Squee100 said:


> 2. Are its vowel ranges the same as Eastern Ashkenazi? The paper below seems to suggest otherwise. Are the vowel ranges of WA or EA closer to those of Sephardi Hebrew?



If you want to compare the ranges of vowels, you'd have to individually compare the ranges of every pair of vowels separately. But again, this is a pointless endeavor, comparable to asking about the difference in hair color between Americans and Canadians.


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## Squee100

One more question.
You say that the vowel phonemes of WA are
אָ German lax o
אַ a (as in all other forms of Hebrew except Yemenite)
אֵ German tense e
אֶ German lax e
אוֹ German tense o
אִ i (as in all other forms of Hebrew)
אוּ u (as in all other forms of Hebrew except some EA)
The same as the Tiberian pronunciation from which it's descended.

Other sources, including the one I linked, say the phonemes are
אָ German o (tense or lax)
אַ a (as in all other forms of Hebrew except Yemenite)
אֵ English long a
אֶ German e (tense or lax)
אוֹ English long o, or ow as in cow
אִ i (as in all other forms of Hebrew)
אוּ u (as in all other forms of Hebrew except some EA)
Which would mean that it went through some vowel shifts you claim it didn't in my thread about the history of Ashkenazi Hebrew.

Which is it?


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## Drink

I didn't say that, and both of those descriptions are wrong and incomplete.

Don't forget that there isn't just one dialect of Western Ashkenazi.

The closest description would be (but again, it's not good to define vowels with other languages' vowels):

long אָ: Standard German tense o
short אָ: Standard German lax o
אַ: Standard German short a 
אֵ: Standard German tense e
long אֶ: Standard German tense e
short אֶ: Standard German lax e
אוֹ: depending on dialect, either Standard German tense o, Standard German diphthong au, or similar to the American English long o
long אִ: Standard German tense i
short אִ: Standard German lax i
long אוּ/אֻ: Standard German tense u
short אוּ/אֻ: Standard German lax u


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## Squee100

THANK YOU!


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## berndf

It doesn't really make sense to describe German vowel oppositions is terms of lax and tense. I find these definitions little meaningful.


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## Drink

I was just mimicking Squee's own terminology. I would have simply called them long and short. Although it must be recognized that the quality distinction is also important.


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## berndf

Drink said:


> I was just mimicking Squee's own terminology. I would have simply called them long and short.


OK. Fine.


Drink said:


> Although it must be recognized that the quality distinction is also important.


Yes, absolutely but I wouldn't describe the quality difference in terms of tense and lax. That might make sense in Dutch but not in German.


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## berndf

*Moderator note: This post was an answer to a duplicate of question in #3 in an other tread, which is now deleted.*

My knowledge of modern Yiddish phonology is amateurish compared to Drink's but I'll try my best to give an answer.

If you replace "lax" by "short/open" and "tense" by "long/closed" then Drink's description is how I learned it as well.

Some comments of the differences between his and your description (I always take "lax" to mean "short/open" and "tense" to mean "long/closed" as the categories tense and lax do not really make sense in German):


Squee100 said:


> אָ German o (*tense *or lax)


I cannot imagine pronunciation of a Kamatz (katan or gadol) like a *closed *German o.


Squee100 said:


> אֵ English long a


The difference to Drinks description (long German e) would be the off-glide in English. To my knowledge the diphthongisation of Tzere is Eastern and not Western. But since most English speakers are unable to pronounce long German e (which is the same as a French é), "English long a" may simply be the closest approximation for an English speaker.


Squee100 said:


> אֶ German e (tense or lax)


A Segol would be open. The opposition between Tzere and Segol is that of the the long/closed and the short/open German _e_.


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## Squee100

More questions: Is there a specific region where all of the vowels are pronounced as given here?

HMYYRBOH YDLYL JYS DMLM or, Hebrew and English spelling book. To which is prefixed an abridgement of the Hebrew grammar

Would you classify it under "Western" or "Central"? Is אֵ pronounced /aj/ anywhere in Western Ashkenazi Hebrew?


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## Drink

I think what's confusing you is that the book you are linking to uses English phonetic spellings, so "ai" means the vowel in the English word "pain". The Ashkenazi pronunciation it describes is definitely Western and definitely not Central.


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## Squee100

Drink said:


> I think what's confusing you is that the book you are linking to uses English phonetic spellings, so "ai" means the vowel in the English word "pain".


The book says Ashkenazi אֵ is pronounced like "ie" in the English word "die".


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## Drink

You're right. It could be that in some forms of Western Ashkenazi, just the /ou/ sounded a little like /au/, the /ei/ also sounded a little like /ai/.


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## Squee100

Another question: I know that long אָ is pronounced [oː] in Western Ashkenazi Hebrew. Is there anywhere in Eastern Ashkenazi where it is pronounced that way as a variant of [ɔ] or [uː]? (I'm not talking about the book anymore.)


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## Drink

Are you talking about the quality of the vowel (like whether it's [o(ː)] anywhere instead of [ɔ(ː)] or [u(ː)])? Or are you asking about the length of the vowel (like whether it's [oː] or [ɔː] anywhere instead of [o] or [ɔ])?


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