The guttural consonants in the Semitic languages are the two laryngeals /ʾ/ (plosive; glottal stop) and /h/ (fricative), and the two pharyngeals /ḥ/ (voiceless fricative) and /ʿ/ (voiced fricative). Hebrew inherited all four of them, as א ʾ, ה h, ח ḥ, and ע ʿ, respectively. A common feature of the gutturals is their tendency to weaken and lose their consonantal sound. The existence of laryngeals in Hittite and their absence from other Indo-European languages indicate that this tendency is not peculiar to Semitic languages, but is rather a…