Sephardi Hebrew Sephardi Hebrew Sephardi Hebrew (or Sepharadi Hebrew) is the pronunciation system for Biblical Hebrew favored for liturgical use by Sephardi Jewish practice. Its phonology was influenced by contact languages such as Spanish, Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino), Arabic, Portuguese and Modern Greek. There is some variation between the various forms of Sephardi Hebrew, but the following generalisations may be made: This last difference is the standard shibboleth for distinguishing Sephardi from Ashkenazi (and Yemenite) Hebrew. The differentiation between kamatz gadol and kamatz katan is made according to purely phonetic rules, without regard to etymology, which occasionally leads to spelling pronunciations at variance with
Sephardi Hebrew of Hebrew in Mishnaic times (1st-2nd centuries), with the Sephardi pronunciation being derived from Judaean and the Ashkenazi from Galilean. The theory is supported by the fact that Ashkenazi Hebrew, like Samaritan Hebrew, has lost the distinct sounds of many of the guttural letters, and there are references in the Talmud to that as a feature of Galilean speech. Idelsohn ascribes the Ashkenazi (and, on his theory, Galilean) pronunciation of qamats gadol as to the influence of Phoenician: see Canaanite shift. During the Masoretes (8th-10th centuries), there were three distinct notations for denoting vowels and other details of pronunciation in