1717: Pronunciation of ע (Accents over Time) Aug 27, 2019

It is typical for any language for some of the sounds to change over time. You can see more about this regarding English in the video released today. This is one of the reasons (among many) that the Hebrew alphabet not only multiple pairs of letters able to represent the same sounds, but also 3 letters representing no sound, sort of. One of these letters, now often mistakenly likened to a vowel in Hebrew, and acting as a vowel for Yiddish and Ladino, ע (ayin) ‎but traditionally this sound was a glottal fricative, having a similar oral posture (position of the mouth) as with [s] but produced at the back of the throat. Now it is most often a glottal stop. In Arabic, it still usually retains this pronunciation, but it varies in different regions.