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To: Jack Hydrazine

Don’t know how that got posted twice.

It’s been so long that I don’t even remember what form we learned, but it must have been ashkenazi. I wish I remembered more, but time takes its toll. Not long after we finished the course, I got sent out to Teheran for a couple of months. While out shopping for souvenirs one afternoon, I stumbled on to a jeweler’s shop on the main drag, Takht-i-Jamshid. It was owned and operated by Jews, whom I assumed to be Sephardic. I tried speaking with them in Hebrew, but failed miserably. A few years later, I got stationed in Saudi Arabia, and while there, my late wife and I took some Arabic lessons in the embassy. There were a lot of similarities between Arabic and Hebrew, the most obvious being the tri-radical root system of the verbs, and sublineal diacritical marks. I didn’t do very well at Arabic either. Turns out I do a lot better with the Romance languages. I did well to teach my kids English. If they want to learn Hebrew, they’ll have to do it on their own. At my age now, I wouldn’t take on anything as challenging as Hebrew or Arabic.


22 posted on 12/21/2011 6:07:16 PM PST by Ax
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To: Ax

What you learned in school, what you hear on the TV and radio in Israel, and most everywhere in Israel is Sephardic. I am sure the Persian Jews have their own dialect, too, just like the Yemenites.


23 posted on 12/21/2011 10:23:53 PM PST by Jack Hydrazine (It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine!)
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