Pharyngeals and beyond: phonetic differences and phonemic mergers in Hebrew
Monthly Archives: February 2018
Spring 2018 Speaker Schedule
Date | Speaker | Title |
2/14/2018 | – | LLL(Lite) |
2/21/2018 | ||
2/28/2018 | Roey Gafter (Ben Gurion University) | Pharyngeals and beyond: phonetic differences and phonemic mergers in Hebrew (![]() |
3/7/2018 | Kasia Hitczenko(University of Maryland) | How to use context to disambiguate overlapping categories: The test case of Japanese vowel length |
3/14/2018 | Susan Kalt (Roxbury Community College) | Changes in Bolivian Quechua evidentiality |
3/21/2018 | Gale Goodwin Gomez (RIC) | CANCELLED |
4/4/2017 | Meghan Armstrong-Abrami (UMass) | Children’s detection of epistemic strength distinctions through prosody and the lexicon (![]() |
4/11/2018 | Angela Carpenter (Wellesley College) | Dialect change in immigrant speakers of Jamaican Creole |
4/18/2018 | Yiming Gu (Brown University) | Tone sandhi in Ganyu Mandarin |
4/25/2018 | Haoru Zhang (Brown University) | Phonetic Convergence in Mandarin |
5/2/2018 | Sandra Waxman (Northwestern University) | Colloquium – Becoming human: How (and how early) do infants link language and cognition? |
Talk (2/27/2018): Roey Gafter (Ben Gurion University)
Tuesday, February 27, 2018 12:00pm
Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center, Petteruti Lounge (Rm 201),
75 Waterman Street, Providence RI
Roey Gafter from Ben Gurion University will give a talk on ethnicity and language in Israel among Hebrew speakers. This is a wide-audience talk, which will be followed by a more linguistic-y talk in LLL (separate notice and abstract will be sent that week). Details of his talk are as follows:
Among Israelis, Jewish ethnicity is often organized around a binary distinction between Ashkenazi Jews (Jews of European descent) and Mizrahi Jews (Jews of Middle Eastern descent). In this talk, I explore how Hebrew is spoken by Israelis of different ethnicities, and show that framing ethnicity as an Ashkenazi-Mizrahi binary hides many meaningful distinctions, both linguistically and socially. I discuss the aspects of Hebrew accents most strongly associated with Mizrahi identity and show that their history and the social dynamic in Israel have imbued them with a rich social meaning that goes far beyond a simple ethnic marker. I then discuss Hebrew features that are not stereotypically associated with ethnicity and show how they can be used in the construction of specific ethnic personae.
More information about the speaker can be found here.