page_title: Yemenite Hebrew
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Yemenite Hebrew / History
caption_attribution_description: English: A page scanned by me from an old Yemenite Siddur, handwritten in Yemen in the 1930's, showing the opening lines of Pirke Avot.
context_page_description: Yemenite Hebrew, also referred to as Temani Hebrew, is the pronunciation system for Hebrew traditionally used by Yemenite Jews. Yemenite Jews brought their language to Israel through immigration. Their first organized immigration to the region began in 1882.
  Yemenite Hebrew has been studied by language scholars, many of whom believe it to retain older phonetic and grammatical features lost elsewhere. Yemenite speakers of Hebrew have garnered considerable praise from language purists because of their use of grammatical features from classical Hebrew. Tunisian rabbi and scholar, Rabbi Meir Mazuz, once said of Yemenites that they are good grammarians. It is believed by some scholars that its phonology was heavily influenced by spoken Yemeni Arabic. Other scholars and rabbis, including Rabbi Yosef Qafih and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, hold the view that Yemenite Hebrew was not influenced by Yemenite Arabic, as this type of Arabic was also spoken by Yemenite Jews and is distinct from the liturgical Hebrew and the conversational Hebrew of the communities.
context_section_description: 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 system of vowel symbols, which is believed to antedate the Tiberian vowel system. As late as 937 CE, Qirqisāni wrote: “The biblical readings which are wide-spread in Yemen are in the Babylonian tradition." Indeed, in many respects, such as the assimilation of paṯaḥ and səġūl, the current Yemenite pronunciation fits the Babylonian notation better than the Tiberian (though the Babylonian notation does not reflect the approximation between holam and sere in some Yemenite dialects). This is because in the Babylonian tradition of vocalization there is no distinct symbol for the səġūl. 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. 
  The following chart shows the seven vowel paradigms found in the Babylonian supralinear punctuation, which are reflected to this day by the Yemenite pronunciation of Biblical lections and liturgies, though they now use the Tiberian symbols. For example, there is no separate symbol for the Tiberian səġūl and the pataḥ and amongst Yemenites they have the same phonetic sound. In this connection, the Babylonian vowel signs remained in use in Yemen long after the Babylonian Biblical tradition had been abandoned, almost until our own time.
caption: Section of Yemenite Siddur, with Babylonian supralinear punctuation (Pirke Avot)
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