11 Facts About Yemenite Hebrew

Yemenite Hebrew, referred to as Temani Hebrew, is the pronunciation system for Hebrew traditionally used by Yemenite Jews.

Yemenite Hebrew has been studied by language scholars, many of whom believe it to retain older phonetic and grammatical features lost elsewhere.

Yemenite speakers of Hebrew have garnered considerable praise from language purists because of their use of grammatical features from classical Hebrew.

Yemenite Hebrew pronunciation is not uniform, and Morag has distinguished five sub-dialects, the best known being probably Sana'ani, originally spoken by Jews in and around Sana'a.

Distinct feature of Yemenite Hebrew is that there is some degree of approximation between the holam and the sere.

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Geographically isolated for centuries, the Yemenite Hebrew Jews constituted a peculiar phenomenon within Diaspora Jewry.

The Yemenite Hebrew reading traditions of the Bible are now based on the Tiberian text and vocalization, as proofread by the masorete, Aaron ben Asher, with the one exception that the vowel s?gul is pronounced as a patah, since the s?gul did not exist in the Babylonian orthographic tradition to which the Jews of Yemen had previously been accustomed.

Two of the more recognized Yemenite Hebrew pronunciations are for the words ??? and ????, the first pronounced as Ribbi, instead of Rabbi, and the second pronounced guvra, instead of gavra.

Along these same lines, the Masoretic Text of the Yemenite Hebrew Bible renders the words, in II Chronicles 26:6, and, in Nehemiah 7:37; 11:35, as Yavn? and Loð, respectively.

The Yemenite Hebrew preposition is always written with the noun, joined together as one word, and the lamed is always accentuated with a dagesh.

One of the nouns used for bread is himmus (Yemenite Hebrew: ), derived from the blessing that is said whenever breaking bread, [?????? [??? ?? ???? = He that brings forth [bread from the earth].