[Avodah] Historu of Havarah

[T613K at aol.com]

TK:  >>: Some people say it was not a different accent but a  speech defect  
that was 
: common among the people of  Ephraim.<<

RMB:  >>I'm not sure if it's possible for it  to be a physical speech defect. 
The
sounds /s/ vs /sh/ differ only by tongue  placement. You can turn an /s/
into a /sh/ making approximately the same  sound (same to my ear) by
constricting the air flow pretty much anywhere  along the tongue. (I'll
pause while the reader inevitably experiments...) If  they really lacked
the mobility for any of those placements to be possible,  they would have
lost half the alphabet, not to mention having a hard time  drinking.<<
 
>>>>>
.
I don't know why you would say that a speech defect must be either learned  
(like an accent) OR the result of a physical malformation.  My son  could never 
pronounce "s" correctly -- he had a lisp -- until he had a few  months of 
speech therapy when he was six.   He heard everyone around  him pronouncing the 
"s" correctly but for some reason couldn't reproduce the  sound.  The fact that 
the speech therapist was able to correct the lisp  meant that he did have the 
necessary physical equipment to pronounce it  correctly. 
 
Absent an obvious physical abnormality I don't know what causes speech  
defects but they are pretty common.  Possibly they are indeed caused by a  subtle 
physical abnormality which makes it a bit harder to pronounce certain  sounds 
correctly.  Another cause of speech defects might be subtle hearing  problems 
and/or some subtle brain defect causing it to register sounds  incorrectly.  My 
daughter confused "w" and "r" until she too had several  months of speech 
therapy -- not only did she pronounce words wrong, she spelled  them wrong too, 
swapping "r"s for "w"s!  I can only conclude that somehow,  "r" and "w" sounded 
alike to her.

--Toby  Katz
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