Italian Hebrew

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Italian Hebrew or Italki Hebrew refers to the pronunciation system for liturgical Hebrew traditionally used by Italian Jews.

Features

The Italian pronunciation of Hebrew is similar to that of conservative Spanish and Portuguese Jews. Distinguishing features are:

This pronunciation has in many cases been adopted by the Sephardi, Ashkenazi and Appam communities of Italy as well as by the Italian rite communities.

Related Research Articles

The Hebrew alphabet, known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is traditionally an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. In modern Hebrew, vowels are increasingly introduced. It is also used informally in Israel to write Levantine Arabic, especially among Druze. It is an offshoot of the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, which flourished during the Achaemenid Empire and which itself derives from the Phoenician alphabet.

Modern Hebrew has 25 to 27 consonants and 5 to 10 vowels, depending on the speaker and the analysis.

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References

  1. Elia S. Artom, "La pronuncia dell'ebraico presso gli Ebrei di Italia", in Scritti in memoria di F. Luzzatto, Rassegna Mensile di Israel 28 (1962): 26-30.