[Avodah] Changing Havarah

[T613K at aol.com]

R' David Bannett writes:

>>R' Yosef Kafach in his book on  minhagei Teiman states that 
the men in San'a said oy and the women ei. (ei =  eh-ee, not 
ah-ee). << 




.
>>>> 
How fascinating that men and women would have different  pronunciations!  The 
only other place I've heard of such a thing was in the  ante-bellum Deep 
South (and to some extent even today), where women had  much more marked Southern 
drawls than men.  Linguists speculate  that the women were more influenced by 
the accents of their Negro slaves (whose  accents in turn derived from the 
African languages of their countries of  origin), and also that the men were more 
likely to have gone North to  school, which would have caused them to 
moderate their Southern drawls.   But what would have happened in Yemen that would 
account for men and women  pronouncing the same words differently?


--Toby  Katz
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