<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1586" name=GENERATOR></HEAD>
<BODY id=role_body style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #000000; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"
bottomMargin=7 leftMargin=7 topMargin=7 rightMargin=7><FONT id=role_document
face=Arial color=#000000 size=2>
<DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV><FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" face=Arial color=#000000
size=2>R' David Bannett writes:<BR><BR>>>R' Yosef Kafach in his book on
minhagei Teiman states that <BR>the men in San'a said oy and the women ei. (ei =
eh-ee, not <BR>ah-ee). << <BR></FONT></DIV></DIV>
<DIV></DIV></DIV>
<DIV>.</DIV>
<DIV>>>>> </DIV>
<DIV>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?</DIV>
<DIV><FONT lang=0 face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF"
PTSIZE="10"><B><BR></B><BR><B>--Toby
Katz<BR>=============</B></FONT></DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>