Talk:Sephardi Hebrew language

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i've been under the impression that there was also a type of sephardic hebrew used in everyday speech.

see also: talk pages on ashkenazic hebrew language and mizrahi hebrew language

Gringo300 10:43, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Modern Israeli Hebrew is often described as "sephardic" (although it is not). Among sfaradim prior to the 1900s, the everyday languages were predominantly Judæo-Arabic and Judezmo (Ladino), and each community's pronunciation of Hebrew more or less reflected that reality... In places where variants of Judæo-Arabic were spoken, the number of consonant phonemes was generally larger and more often parallelled Teimani pronunciation (Sanaani, not overall Teimani) or the phonemic structure of the surrounding Arabic dialects, while in places where Judezmo was the spoken language, phonemes were regularly reduced to more closely match the phonemic structure of the particular Judezmo dialect, so for example, whereas in areas where Arabic speakers regularly differentiated between what are, in Hebrew, teth, taw and thaw, these distinctions might be preserved in the local Sfaradi pronunciation of Hebrew. Judezmo, however, has but a single "t" sound, and so in such communities, the situation that has gained prominence in Israel is found: the three different sounds are all just simply pronounced /t/. Aside from sweeping generalizations, however, it's difficult to tack down boundaries of what constitutes "Sfaradi Hebrew" as opposed to "Modern Israeli Hebrew" or "Mizrachi Hebrew", which is why Sephardi Hebrew language is probably doomed to forever be rather stubby... Tomer ^TALK 00:32, 4 November 2005 (UTC)