- This term is baffling. No Hebrew speakers but a few non-natives with unreconstructed English accents have what is usually known as a retroflex /r/; if Klausner meant something else (e. g. a retroflex apical flap or trill as distinct from a flat apical), he should have made this clear; even this variety is extremely uncommon, and was never noted by me in native speakers. Altogether, the terminology used is not calculated to arouse full confidence in Klausner's linguistic training. His “low pharyngeal gurgle” cannot be a pharyngeal at all since there are no pharyngeal allophones of /ḥ/, but only of /ḥ/ or ζ and the inadequacy of the term “gurgle,” quite apart from its “loaded” character, is self-evident. We assume that what is meant is a retracted variety of voiceless uvular spirant (see n. 4 below). What is listed as “Kurdish” among the subjects' home languages must refer to the Neo-East-Aramaic spoken by the Kurdistan Jews, whose language is commonly called /kurdit/ in Hebrew; no Kurdish is, so fan as I know, spoken in Israel. The phoneme /h/, which Klausner blandly states occurs in Arabic only, is also found in many varieties of Neo-East-Aramaic, as well as in the Tadjik (not “Bucharian”) language spoken by the Bukharian Jews, and in the traditional Hebrew pronunciation of some other groups. What is meant by listing the home language of eight subjects as “Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian” is unclear. S. Morag, whom Klausner thanks in a footnote for his “advice on Hebrew phonetic symbols,” informs he that he is in no way accountable for the terminology or classification used.
- This classification is discussed more fully in my manuscript paper “Israeli Hebrew Texts,” which is to appear in Studies in Egyptology and Linguistics in Honour ol H. J. Pololsky, Jerusalem.
- Or as when E. K., a veteran announcer who emcee's a sort of “Information Please” program rolls his r's like a French gendarme (viz. apically) when formally introducing and closing the program, but comes off his high horse and back to his uvulars when presenting the questions to the experts in an informal give-and-take. This is done with great consistency. Many singers and actors show a similar stylistic variation (singing vs. talking, onstage vs. offstage).
- Some orthoepists, however, teach that the most retracted and most rasping variants of /x/ are “bad” and ought to be shunned in favor of more advanced, less rasping uvulars or even prevelar spirants. Little heed seems to be paid to this by radio announcers, tho some have told me they “try” to follow this advice. If this is what Klausner meant, his generalization is unwarranted and his failure to distinguish between normative precept and actual usage indefensible.
- Here again orthoepists and normativists enjoin that /ḥ/ be pronounced as indicated by the spelling, and there are feeble, intermittent attempts to do so on the part of some, esp. neophyte, announcers.
- More exactly: tho this cannot yet be shown systematically for lack of adequate research, it is safe to state at this stage that virtually the whole phonic stock of Ashkenazified Israeli Hebrew is a direct outgrowth of the phonic stock of the first waves of settlers who used and propagated Hebrew speech. These were, by and large, native speakers of Yiddish, and as such most of them knew only uvular /r/ and /x/. Today, however, the Ashkenazified or prevailing form of native Hebrew is spoken, uvulars and all, without direct correlation with the parents' linguistic habits. Speakers of other varieties, non-native or Arabicized, exhibit the same sounds to the extent that (a) they are present in their native speech habits, or (b) they are acquired by assimilating the Askhenazified sounds. Klausner has stated this process of “Ashken-azification” with respect to loss of / ḥ/ but the “upper level—lower level” terminology is facile and misleading (precisely because it has some prima facie basis in fact), and the “correct—incorrect” distinction reflects irrelevent normativism.
- Vague terminology and unclear normalcy standards are again responsible for the lack of certainty. We must take Klausner's word for it that everything he marked as a “laterally lisped (‘hissed’)” [s1] is less acceptable as normal than everything he marked as “regular [s].”
- J. F, Curtis, “Disorders of Articulation,” in W. Johnsonet al., Speech Handicapped Schoolchildren, New York, 1948, p. 94.
- In particular, A. Bar-Adon, a veteran school teacher who has for the past seven years been gathering materials on child language from hundreds of subjects.
- V. Riper, Speech Correction: Principles and Methods, 2d ed., 4th pr., New York 1950, p. 135: “We feel that it [parental baby talk] is not a very common cause [of articulatory disorders].” Incidentally, the discussion there makes it quite clear that baby talk and overprotection are not necessarily connected, and influence speech in different ways.
- S. F. Brown, “Retarded Speech Development”, in Johnson et. al. (op. cit.), p. 269; Riper, op. cil., p. 393ff.
- “Riper, op. cit., p. 141: “By and large, poor teaching methods are, no doubt, responsible for more deficient articulations than is any other factor.”
- D. M. Levy, Maternal Overprotection, New York 1941, p. 77.
- Mardel Ogilvie, Terminology and Definitions of Speech Defects, New York, 1942.
- [X] and [ʁ] are not speech defects. They are included in this analysis for their possible symbolic value in personality expression.
- J. Darrel Mase, Etiology of Articulators Speech Defects, New York, 1946.
- Ogilvie, op. cit.
- Among the many others who have related articulatory defects to infantile regression are Allen, Yerbury, and Fenichel. However, the author would differ with them on the relative importance of this etiological factor for defects other than the lingual lisp. See I. M. Allen, “Defects of Speech Function in Childhood,” New Zealand Medical Journal 46.297 307 (1947); Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, New York, 1945, pp. 311 ff.; E. C. Yerbury, “The Relation of Speech Disorders to Emotional Disturbances,” Journal of Pediatrics 21.412–415 (1942).
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