Contents of this weekly column are (mostly) based on the sefer: EIM LAMIKRA HASHALEIM, by R' Nissan Sharoni, Ashdod, a guide to correct pronunciation of Hebrew, specifically in davening and Torah reading. Here’s a thought. Remember learning spelling of English words? Parts of speech? Sentence structure? The difference between “went” and have gone”? Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. But the point is, whether we’re dealing with English,. French, Spanish, Russian, or Latin, we’re dealing with a language among the many languages of the world. How many are there? One website has dictionaries for 150 languages and grammar for 70 of them. Ethnologue.com lists 6,800 “main languages”, and 41,000 alternate names and dialects. Go easy on this site; it will blow you away! What’s the point? Just this: Hebrew, our davening and Torah reading. It’s not like any other languge. It is LASHON HAKODESH. There- fore, what we are doing in this column is not like any other study of languge. Keep that in mind when we work on the difference between VAYIR-U (and they saw) and VAYI-R’U (and they revered). And when we try to pronounce the first word of the last paragraph of Birkat HaMazon properly. [There is a SH’VA under the YUD, no vowel under the REISH, and an ALEF with a SHURUK. The word has one syllable. Y’RU. Not YIRU. Not YIR-U. Y’RU.] Thinking this way, it almost doesn’t matter if a mispronunciation changes the meaning of a word or not. We’re dealing with a holy langu- age. THE holy language. (Of course, we know that there is a difference if the meaning is changed or not, but you get the extra point.) Let’s go back to column #49 from TT #546. We were looking at the
first chapter in EIM L’MIKRA HASHALEIM, about the letters of the ALEF-BET. A common occurrence of this is words where a letter with a SH’VA (NACH) is followed by an ALEF with a vowel. Glory - TIF-ERET. It is very easy to misread the word as TI-FERET. Sounds similar, but the ALEF is gone. Here’s a good example, which the participants at the Shabbaton last week were made aware of. SHALOM ALEICHEM MAL-ACHEI HASHAREIT, welcome angels. An angel is a MAL-ACH. MEM- LAMED with a SH’VA, ALEF with a PATACH, and a CHAF-SOFIT. The possessive form is MEM- LAMED with a SH’VA, ALEF with CHATAF- PATACH, CHAF with a TZEIREI, YUD. Continue singing. MAL-ACHEI ELYON... continue MI- MELECH MAL-CHEI... Here MAL-CHEI refers to G-d as the King of Kings. There is not ALEF in the word. But listen to the way other people sing SHALOM ALEICHEM. They will sometimes inter- change the pronunciations. And the meaning will change. MAL-CHEI ELYON, kings of High, instead of angels, and worse - referring to G-d as the king of the king’s angels. Pay attention this coming Friday night. Sing it correctly yourself, but listen to the others around the table. Bring up the topic after HaMotzi, but don’t sound as if you are preaching. It happens even when there is a SH’VA NA, but people NACH it.
And then they drop the silent letter with the vowel. Sort of two mistakes in the
same place. Shacharit, before the Amida, right before T’HILOT L’KEIL ELYON.
B’EIT SHAV’AM EILAV. SHAVV’AM. The VAV has a DAGESH in it and a SH’VA NA under
it. The “worst” pronuncia- tion is SHAVAM, as if the AYIN is not there at all.
Some people will recognize the AYIN and say SHAV and then AM. Better. But that
reading makes the VAV’s SH’VA a NACH. Which it isn’t. The second syllable in the
word is V’AM. The first syllable is more than SHA. The DAGESHed VAV is shared by
both syllables. SHAV and V’AM. But don’t separate the two VAVs. Because there is
only one VAV. Let the two VAVs blend together (something we try not to do when
there are actually two of the same letters - B’CHOL L’VA-V’CHA. Here we try to
avoid blending the two LAMEDs thereby losing one of them.) <mtc> [The Parshat Bo Homepage]
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