# Modern Hebrew/Yiddish/Arabic: Pronunciation of /a/, /aː/, /i/, /iː/



## Squee100

Can anyone who is well-versed in Modern Hebrew, Yiddish, and Arabic explain to me how to pronounce the a-type and i-type vowels in each? Whether they're "ih" and "uh", "ee" and "ah", or some other combination?


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## bazq

I do not know how "ih"/"uh"/"ee"/"ah" are realized phonetically, so I'm not sure how to help you.
I think it's best you take a look at the IPA charts of each language, and there are probably audio examples for each vowel (in Wikipedia for instance, maybe on other sites as well).


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## hadronic

Hebrew doesn't have long vowels, so there's only /i/ and /a/.

/i/ is correctly pronounced as [ i ]  _ (_English_ ee, _without the length), but very often it tends to be laxer,  [ɪ] (English _ih_).

/a/ is correctly pronounced as [a] (French _a,_ this sound barely exists in English), but very often it tends to be laxer, as [ʌ] (English _uh)_ or even [ɔ] especially in unstressed environment. Nasalization in stressed syllable is also somewhat frequent.


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## Squee100

bazq said:


> I do not know how "ih"/"uh"/"ee"/"ah" are realized phonetically, so I'm not sure how to help you.
> I think it's best you take a look at the IPA charts of each language, and there are probably audio examples for each vowel (in Wikipedia for instance, maybe on other sites as well).


"ih" like in "fit", "ee" like in "feet", "uh" like in "cup", and "ah" like in "father".


hadronic said:


> Hebrew doesn't have long vowels, so there's only /i/ and /a/.
> 
> /i/ is correctly pronounced as [ i ]  _ (_English_ ee, _without the length), but very often it tends to be laxer,  [ɪ] (English _ih_).
> 
> /a/ is correctly pronounced as [a] (French _a,_ this sound barely exists in English), but very often it tends to be laxer, as [ʌ] (English _uh)_ or even [ɔ] especially in unstressed environment. Nasalization in stressed syllable is also somewhat frequent.


Is it the same for Yiddish? What English words should I use as examples of those sounds?


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## Drink

The problem is that each of the languages you listed has many different dialects and hostorical stages, each of which had different pronunciations for these long and short vowels. So we would need to know, what kind of Hebrew (well, you said Modern Hebrew)? What dialect of Yiddish? What dialect of Arabic?


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## Squee100

The "standard" pronunciation of each language (TBH, that's the only reason I referred to Modern Hebrew because I feel like that term puts down the Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Yemenite/Teimani pronunciations.)


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## Drink

In Modern Hebrew and Standard Yiddish, there is no length distinction in vowels; in both languages the a is pronounced like in the English word "father" with a Boston accent. The Modern Hebrew i is (I think) sort of in between the vowel of "bin" and the vowel of "bean"; in Standard Yiddish the i vowel depends on the native dialect of the speaker, it could be like "bin", it could be like "bean", or somewhere in between, or even depend on whether that vowel is long or short in the speaker's native dialect.

As for Arabic, the most standard pronunciation of short i is like in the English word "bin" and of long i like in the English word "bean"; the long and short a varies a lot more based on the native dialect of the speaker, there isn't a real standard.


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## berndf

Drink said:


> As for Arabic, the most standard pronunciation of short i is like in the English word "bin" and of long i like in the English word "bean"; the long and short a varies a lot more based on the native dialect of the speaker, there isn't a real standard.


With only three qualites being distinguished (/a/, /i/, /u/ plus their long counterparts), there is of course a great deal of variation, both allophonic and free, even within a dialect.


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## duvija

The problem is in the question itself. There is no 'same' sound for those three languages.
I know only Yiddish, and for this, the vowels tend to be   ɪ, ʊ, ɑ - I'm using IPA here. (IPA character picker 19)
And I really mean 'tend to'. All depends on the dialect and even the consonants surrounding those vowels, like in every other language in the world.


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