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In Israeli as in Biblical Hebrew, vowel length is an automatic corollary of degree of stress, with little or no phonemic consequences (Vowel Length: Modern Hebrew). However, similar to the pre-tonal lengthening observed in Biblical Hebrew (as in the first vowel of דָּבָר då̄ḇå̄r < * dabar ‘utterance; thing’; Pretonic Lengthening: Biblical Hebrew), speakers of Israeli Hebrew also sometimes lengthen vowels in the syllable preceding the main stress, usually in an unstressed open syllable, the same environment as in Biblical Hebrew. It should be…

Biblical Hebrew stops (other than ק q, the emphatic ט ṭ and the glottal א ʾ) were spirantized postvocalically. In Modern Hebrew spirantization (= fricativization) is much more restricted; it is limited to the consonant pairs b-v (ב), k-x (כ), and p-f (פ), and even among those there are so many counter-examples that the fricative members of these pairs can no longer be deemed allophones, but must be considered independent phonemes. The counter-examples, ‘violations’ of the rules of normative grammar, arise mostly when forms become opaque…

The Hebrew imperative is a morphological category with a well-defined grammatical form, but, functionally, its use is not restricted to commands; the imperative form conveys a variety of modal meanings, such as command, request, a wish, urging someone to do something, etc. In form, it is close to the prefix-conjugated verb (the so-called ‘future’). Thus, in the piʿel conjugation, for instance, the stem CaCeC serves both: Prefixed Conjugation תדבר tedaber ‘you (ms) will speak’ תדברי tedabri ‘you (fs) will speak’ תדברו tedabru ‘you (pl) will speak’ Imperative Form דבר daber ‘(you ms) …

A diminutive is a variant of (usually) a noun or an adjective, which denotes a smaller version of the base word; it may also variously connote affection and familiarity, disparagement, and occasionally even intensification (see Dressler et al. 1994; Sagi 1999). The semantics associated with diminution and the relative frequency of diminutive formation devices in Hebrew have changed significantly over the years. Segal (1925) associates diminution with affixation, mainly feminine gender marking, and argues that in the early stages of lan…

Israeli Hebrew possesses the following vowel phonemes: a, e, i, o, u. Vowel length is environmentally determined and not phonemic; it tends to be affected by degree of stress, and pretonic lengthening may also occur, mostly in open syllables (Pretonic Lengthening: Modern Hebrew). In one class of cases, however, vowel length may be argued to have re-emerged as a semi-distinctive feature. When a glottal (אʾ or ה h) or pharyngeal (עʿ) consonant is lost, a two-vowel sequence arises; if the two vowels are identical, they merge into a single long vowel: תעבוד taʿavod ‘you will work’ > taavod > ta:v…

For a discussion of the class of Hebrew nouns known as segholates in their historical context Segholates: Pre-Modern Hebrew; below are some comments on their synchronic status in Israeli Hebrew. Segholates are the largest morphological class of words in the native lexicon that does not have word-final stress. As shown in the main entry (Segholates: Pre-Modern Hebrew), this is easily explained from a diachronic perspective: stress assignment applied before the seghol was inserted to break an impermissible word-final consonant cluster, i.e., when the surface penul…

1. Introduction Phonology is the study of significantly distinct sounds (phonemes) in a language, their organization, and how they affect each other in context. Phonological analysis is based on phonetic data (articulatory, as well as acoustic), and in turn serves as a basis for studying morphology, syntax, semantics/pragmatics, and, of course, orthography. Thus, in describing the phonology of Israeli Hebrew, we first need to look at its phonemic inventory of consonants and vowels. Some speakers of ‘Arabicized’ Hebrew (see Blanc 1964 and elsewher…

In Israeli Hebrew the ususal articulation of ר /r/ is close to the voiced uvular fricative [ʁ] (see Bolozky 1978; 1997). Laufer (2008) points out that the rhotic sound group in Israeli Hebrew includes a range of phonetic realizations of ר /r/, of which the uvular approximant is the most common. This is also consistent with the findings of Bolozky and Kreitman (2007), where a wide array of realizations is reported, from a trill—sometimes accompanied by frication—to a full trill or a segment with no trilling at all, as in glides. However, an alveolar realization of ר /r/ also exists in some …

In casual Hebrew speech consonant elision applies mostly to sonorant consonants, as in: ?יש לך רגע yéš le.xà régaʿ ‘do you have a moment?’ > yé.še.xà réga > yéš.xa réga החבר שלך àx̱avér šel.xà ‘your (ms) friend’ > àx̱avér še.xà As these examples show, the sonorant l can be elided either in the syllable onset (לך le.xà) or in the coda (שלך šel.xà). Elision is more likely to occur in clitics and affixes, which are high-frequency items by their very nature, or in high-frequency lexical items, since high frequency facilitates recoverability of reduced forms by…

Sonority is a concept which phonologists and phoneticians have been using since the 19th century, but they have not reached agreement on how it should be defined (see Parker 2002 for a fairly exhaustive list of definitions). Like the syllable, it is not a precise phonetic concept, and some phoneticians argue that it is not even ‘phonetically real’. It has, however, proved useful within the realm of phonology, with articulatory and perceptual correlates, and phonologists (again Parker 2002, for e…

The glottal stop א ʾalef /ʾ/, is rarely realized in Israeli Hebrew, regardless of whether it is underlyingly א ʾalef / ʾ/ or ע ʿayin / ʿ/, e.g., אני ʾaní ‘I, me’ > aní אמר ʾamar ‘he said’ > amár על ʿal ‘on, about’ > ʾal > al עברית ʿivrít ‘Hebrew’ > ʾivrít > ivrit A barely audible glottal stop tends to be automatically produced before a vowel at the beginning of a breath group, either at the start of a sentence or after a pause. This, however, does not by itself suffice to prove its phonemic status. Still, there are good reasons to regard the glottal stop as a phoneme in Israeli Hebrew. To be…