Reply To: Why does Yiddish butcher Hebrew

Akuperman,

1. You’re a funny guy. But don’t give up your day job.
2. If Hashem wanted us to wear black hats’ He would have had photographs taken at Har Sinai.
2. The pronunciation of English indeed changed. This is known as the Great Vowel Shift, BTW, Ashkenazim originally pronounced the צ like a hard “s” , This is how Chazal pronounced it (the word in the Gemara for “stadium” is אצטדיון – the א was added because the could not pronounce a sheva nach at the beginning of a word), Two of the Baalei Tosafot are רבי אליזר ממיץ (in French, Messe) and השר מקוצי (Coucy), The change is obviously the influence of German (in fact, in German, Messe is Metz).

Happy, apparently Ashkenazim simply softened the pronunciation of the ת רופפת and Sephardim hardened it. Yemenites still pronounce it like the English “th”. Based on transliterations of Biblican names (e.g. Ruth), this was probably the original pronunciation.