Gutturals in General Israeli Hebrew

Abstract

Abstract Modern Hebrew is written with the traditional Hebrew orthography, which contains several symbols that refer to guttural sounds. However, the pronunciations corresponding to these symbols in Modern Hebrew are not phonetically guttural. This paper is an exhaustive survey of these realizations. It shows that in many cases, there are reasons to think that even though no sound is produced, there is an underlying segment in the position of the historical guttural, and this segment behaves in a predictable manner. That said, alongside this general pattern, there are some effects related to historical gutturals that must be regarded as morpheme-specific, as well as some idiosyncrasies of the different original gutturals.