The Pronunciation of Hebrew in the Western Sephardic Settlements (16th-20th Centuries). Second Part: The Pronunciation of the Consonant <i>‘Ayin</i>

Abstract

The purpose of this investigation was to ascertain when the Italian Jewish communities and the Western Portuguese “Nations” adopted the nasal-guttural pronunciation of the ‘ayin , variously represented as gn, ng, ngh, hg . In 16th century Ferrara and Venice, the phonetic value of this consonant was zero or close to zero. Only at the very end of the 16th century, some authors in Italy graphically represented it as ng. In the same period, an Amsterdam author introduced new graphemes and expressed the ‘ayin as gh or hg, while a Hamburg scholar published a grammar-book where he gave the name of this consonant as Hgain . The new graphemes were not adopted by the majority of authors, who continued to represent it by a simple h, or left it without notation. Both in Italy and in Northern Europe, the h > gn shift was rather discontinuous.