Yemenite Hebrew - History

History

Yemenite Hebrew may have been derived from, or influenced by, the Hebrew of the Geonic era Babylonian Jews: the oldest Yemenite manuscripts use the Babylonian rather than the Tiberian system of vowel symbols. In certain respects, such as the assimilation of paṯaḥ and səḡôl, the current Yemenite pronunciation fits the Babylonian notation better than the Tiberian. It does not follow, as claimed by some scholars, that the pronunciation of the two communities was identical, any more than the pronunciation of Sephardim and Ashkenazim is the same because both use the Tiberian symbols. In fact there are certain characteristic scribal errors, such as the confusion of ḥōlem with ṣêrệ, found only or mainly in the Yemenite manuscripts, indicating that the assimilation of these two vowels was always a Yemenite peculiarity, or else a local variant within the wider Babylonian family, which the Yemenites happened to follow. It should be noted that these sounds are only identical in a minority of Yemenite Jews (e.g. the Sharabi Yemenite Jews), as opposed to that of the Sana'ani pronunciation which most Yemenite Jews use.