Date: 30 Jun 2004
Time: 19:33:58 -0700
Give my greeting to your Rabbi, may he have a long and productive life. The word “grammatical” is one of those big English words that can mean many things. By grammatical, do you mean, structure, arrangement, pronunciation, syntax, meaning, or history? Are the samach סּ and the sin שׂ pronounced exactly alike all the time; are they just found in different words? Or are they located in different parts of a word, so that they take on slightly different sounds; the samach a longer SSS sound and the sin a shorter, more abrupt S sound? We are, of course, talking only about how the Arabic speaking Yemenite people would pronounce these Hebrew letters.
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