[Avodah] Ancient Ashkenazi Hebrew

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Sep 08, 2011 at 09:04:56PM -0400, S. wrote:
: Secondly, we see that (some?) Ashkenazim had a problem with two pasachs
: in the beginning of a word, second letter ayin, hence "mayriv," "tayna,"
: and so forth. Interestingly, the other thing Ashkenazim do is remove
: one altogether when it's an aleph, hence "bal" instead of "ba'al" and so
: forth....

But a youth is a nar, not a nayr.

I think the /y/ sound is similar to the promotion of segol to tzerei
in words like "meilekh", "Peisach", etc... It has to do with speech
patterns in Slavic languages. That wouldn't explain why ayin tends one
way and alef the other (with exceptions). But it would dismiss the /y/
as being indicative of what an ayin used to sound like. OTOH, as REMT
notes, we hold that the /n/ in Yankev can be spelled with an ayin on
a get. Which indicates being sure enough for the purposess of an area
in halakhah where games aren't played (due to potential future mamzeirim
if the get is no good).

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of
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