Friday, August 22, 2008

Be careful how you swear

The בעל קריאה where I lained yesterday seemed to be having a tough time getting his קמצים and פתחים straight. I believe that's altogether a problem in and of itself but it becomes a bigger issue with words like נשבע which appear more than once this week. For those of us אשכנזים who are incapable of or choose not to differentiate between an ע and and א, pronouncing that word with a קמץ would make it sound far too much like נשבה which would drastically change the meaning.