[Mesorah] reish [was:Chataf Patach]

[Micha Berger]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 06:02:58PM -0500, T613K at aol.com wrote:
: I've wondered about that as well. In Israel most people pronounce the
: "r" in the back of their throats like Russians, so it does seem to
: be gronit, but some people pronounce reish as a rolling "r" with the
: tongue behind the front teeth, up against the palate -- sort of like
: Scotchmen -- while Americans of course pronounce the "r" in the front
: of their mouths. And many Asians find it hard to pronounce it at all,
: producing an "L" sound instead. I think it's safe to assume that
: reish was not originally pronounced the way Americans pronounce "r"
: but how /was/ it originally pronounced? It is strange to think that
: there are several totally different ways one letter could be pronounced.

The Israeli reish is probably the gimel refuyah. The reason for that
conclusion...
Look at bege"d kefe"t. They come in pairs, one letter the voiced version
of the other. /b/ is the same motions as /p/ except that when making a /b/
one's vocal chords vibrate. Similarly /d/ vs /t/ (or /dh/ [e.g. that] vs.
/th/ [e.g. thing]). And the /g/ of a gimel degushah vs. the kaf's /k/.
Which means that the /dh/ of the refuyah should be made like the /kh/
of khaf except with the vocal chords vibrating. A sound much like the
Israeli reish.


The American /r/ can be approximated using pretty much any part of the
tongue. A listener can't year if you're raising the tip or the back.



The seifer haYetzirah (pereq 4, repeated in every "mishnah" from 1 to
6) speaks of sheva kefulos -- bg"d kfr"t. 4:5 makes a point of saying
"sheva velo sheish, sheva velo shemoneh, and then begins a series of
things that come in sevens (and I presume paralel). 4:1 describes the
kefulos as heaving a "tavnis rakh veqasheh, gibor vechalash". So there
is a reish that is qashah/gibor and one that is rakh/chalash.

There are a couple of cases of reish degushah in Tanakh, and unlike
the dot in an alef or hei, it's called a dageish, not mapiq-reish. So,
reish can take a dageish, in very rare occasions.

However, what I think people think of when calling reish as a geronit
is (1) the aforementioned pronunciation, which is "throaty" and (2)
it gets a shift in vowel rather than a dageish (e.g. "HaRachaman" has
a qamatz-hei, not a reish degushah), consistent with geroniot.


However, returning to ShY (2:3) we find that alef, ches, hei and ayin
are the geroniot, and zayin, samech, shin, *reish* and tzadi are
"bashinayim".

RSRH's system of related roots doesn't seem to group reish by location of
articulation. IOW, when I cataloged examples, I didn't find roots that
RSRH said were semantically related because they differed in that one
has a reish and the other has a different gutteral or dental. Rather,
it and lamed are a pair. Lamed, OTOH, is assumed to be related to dalet,
tes, nun, and tav. Relatives in both dimensions: place of articulaction
and type of articulation.

Axctually, I found RSRH's system to have three dimensions, but that's
too far efield.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Man can aspire to spiritual-moral greatness
micha at aishdas.org        which is seldom fully achieved and easily lost
http://www.aishdas.org   again. Fullfillment lies not in a final goal,
Fax: (270) 514-1507      but in an eternal striving for perfection. -RSRH