[Mesorah] reish [was:Chataf Patach]

[Noah Witty]

Micha Berger wrote:
> 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, 
which of course, acc. to the good books of Hebrew grammar, it's not.
> 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.
>   
It's a long galus.  In my mother's home, there is a copy of a Haggadah 
published in China: most of the raishes are lameds, e.g. in Kiddush: 
"hin-chi-ranu."
> The Israeli reish is probably the gimel refuyah. 
Absolutely and, if you want, a huge nafkah minah in fulfilling the 
mitzvah of krias shema
> 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 
("hear"?)
> 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 
whoa! raish is not kaful; the /beged-kefet/ are kefulim, n'est-ce pas?
> 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.
>   
This dagesh would be a dagesh chazak.  The degesh for beged-kefet are 
called dagesh kal.  We need to figure out why it would be particularly rare.
> 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".
>   
which is why the taimani pronunciation, i.e. rolling at or touching the 
inside front upper teeth, is most accurate.
American pronunciation is just a function fo best transliteration 
available.  The Israeli raish at the back of the throat is, as was 
stated above in this post, really the accurate gimmel refuyah, 
i.e.gimmel without dagesh.
> 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
>
>   
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