Good Yuntif to all!

[Andrew Gabriel Roth]

Shlama all--

Good yuntif to all.

Shlama w'burkate
Andrew Gabriel Roth

[Amatsyah]

Shlama Andrew!

How linguistically sneaky of you <!-- s --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/wink1.gif" alt="" title="Wink" /><!-- s --> I had to go fishing to interpret you. Turned out to be a good fishing trip! For those others who undoubtedly are curious about ???Yuntif???:

From ???A Bur in the Talmudist???s Side???, article #12172, The Jewish Daily Forward, Wed. Dec. 05, 2007, by Philologos:

And still partly on the subject of the pharyngeal ayin, this e-mail comes from Martin Bodek:

• ???Listening to the weekly Torah reading in the Hasidic shtibl [little synagogue] that I attend, I was struck again by how most Hasidim insert a nun into the name Ya???akov [Jacob], pronouncing it ???Yankev.??? How did it get there? And for that matter, how did the term yom tov, a ???good day??? or Jewish holiday, come to be pronounced by Orthodox Jews as yuntif, with the nun replacing the mem of yom? Are the two nuns related????

They are not. The nun of yuntif is a good example of what linguists call ???assimilation??? ??? that is, the changing of one sound to accommodate it to an adjacent sound. If you say both yom tov and yuntif to yourselves, you???ll see that whereas in yuntif your tongue is in the same position for both the nun and the taf that follows, in yom tov it isn???t and has to be moved. It???s a bit easier to say yon tov (which then turns into yuntif by a devoicing of the final vav), and since we often follow the path of least resistance when we speak, that???s what happened in Eastern Europe. It???s the same phenomenon that, reversed, turns the ???n??? of ???in-??? into an ???m??? in a word like ???impossible.???

As for Yankev, its nun is a vestigial remnant of the pharyngeal contraction of the ayin that disappeared in the Hebrew of Ashkenazic Europe. The same thing happened with the Hebrew word ma???aseh, a story or tall tale, which became mayseh in most of Eastern Europe but manseh in some areas. The reason for this is that in contracting the throat to produce the ayin, a degree of nasalization takes place, as well; when the contraction disappeared among European Jews, the nasalization was retained and even strengthened by some of them, producing an ???n???-sound. This was especially true of Italian Jews, who regularly turned the ayin into a nun in many words. (For instance, the Hebrew word to???eva, abomination, which denotes a Christian church in Judeo-Italian, was pronounced toneva.) Although I can???t at the moment think of other Hebrew words that have nun in place of ayin in Eastern Europe, perhaps some of you can. Be sure to let me know if you do.

~Ryan