[Avodah] History of Havarah

[Daniel Israel]

On Thu, 21 Dec 2006 14:02:17 -0700 Micha Berger <micha at aishdas.org> 
wrote:
>I listed these in increasing order of personal preference. So that 
would be
>how I lean in terms of what to try to roll back. If you know that 
the
>particular shift was due to assimilation of language sounds, then 
>should you revert it?

In this light I sometimes wonder if it is possible to say that the 
shift having occured, should we now change it?  This relates to 
your (RMB's) recent comments about minhagim.  In areas of minhag 
and sometimes even we often don't roll back a mesorah even when we 
find something funny about the origin.  Can we perhaps say that if 
I have a mesorah for a particular pronounciation that it is better 
for me to rely on that then to go mucking around?  After all, what 
I have at least has the justification of a mesorah, even if history 
indicates that it has shifted, whereas anything I "roll back" is my 
own de'os, and who knows how good those are?

--
Daniel M. Israel
dmi1 at cornell.edu