| Abstract: | This paper examines the complex interactions between pharyngeals and vowel quality in Sephardic Modern Hebrew. Phonetically similar to low vowels, gutturals in general and pharyngeals in particular tend to trigger vowel lowering and epenthesis of low vowels. Sephardic Modern Hebrew exhibits multiple strategies in order to avoid the proximity of non-low vowels to pharyngeals. The language processes take into account several factors, including the syllabic position of the pharyngeal (onset or coda), prosody (stress) and lexical category (nouns vs. verbs). |
