The Doctrine of Beitar

86

They depend on what is pleasant to the trained ear of one people or another. And there are examples even of a single language that takes on a completely different sound due to the influences of climate, nature, or race. Who does not know that there is a vast sea of difference between the English accent and the American one? Even greater is the phonetic difference between "Norwegian" and "Danish" — although the language of Ibsen and the language of Andersen is, after all, the same language.

In the days of our language's flourishing in ancient Eretz Israel, we had almost no contact with the Arabs. The name "Arab" is a rarity in the Tanakh. The language of the Arabs developed under conditions of climate and nature foreign to those of our land: in an unlimited expanse and not between the borders from Dan to Beersheba, on the plain and not in valleys, in the tropical heat of Arabia and not between the boundaries of coolness, in the solitude of the desert and not near the crossroads of Assyria. — And the Hebrews, the race is also different. From the beginning of the ancient conquest, Canaan was full of groups like a pomegranate [full of seeds]: Jebusite, Hittite, Amorite, Philistine, and more and more, some of them remnants of nations from Europe and Anatolia, and others sons of Ham. But by the end of the intermediate period, these nations had already disappeared, or almost disappeared: that is to say, they were assimilated within Judah and Israel. Thus the Hebrew was formed as a man of the Mediterranean, in whose blood and soul were blended, by the power of the climate and with several characteristics, also those of the peoples of the north and the west.

It is enough to examine a Hebrew textbook: a person who has never heard either this one or that one will understand from reading the first chapters that two such languages cannot have a similar phonetic character. In Hebrew — most words are accented on the last syllable (milra), a small minority — on the penultimate syllable (mil'el); in Arabic — the most favored stress is the one that falls on the antepenultimate syllable. This difference alone is already proof of how different the musical taste of the ear that created Hebrew is from the musical taste of the ear that created Arabic, or gave the character to their pronunciations; Arabic is limited and is based on three vowels — a, i, u, and even these are distinct only when they are "long vowels" — in any other case their pronunciation is blurred, and it is difficult to distinguish between a and e, between o and u. Hebrew is strict with its five main vowels.