Because we were on the topic, I wanted to share two more points about the pronunciation of the letter vav.
The reasons for pronouncing the vav like a W and not like a V are numerous, and therefore do not need to be rehashed here, but only listed:
1. Positive living traditions that distinguish between vav and vet.
2. Ancient transliterations of Hebrew words into Greek and Latin, and later Arabic transliterations.
3. Grammatical evidence from the plene forms, etc., as I brought in my book.
Consider the following: We all agree that the letter yud sounds like the letter Y. Since we were children, we became used to the strange phenomenon of when labial vowels, like the long O and U sounds, are followed by the sound of Y. In Hebrew, it is quite surprising that the following words, וִדּוּי רָאוּי עָשֹוּי seem to have a phantom hiriq sound after the shuruq, as though we say רָאוּאִי and עשוּאִי, ra-U-ee and a-SU-ee, even though the sound should just be UY. Note that in classical dialects of Aramaic, the plural, male possessive suffix is sometimes rendered וֹהִי and sometimes just וֹי. Similarly, the word for water is sometimes מוי and sometimes מוהי. This, as the linguists and speech therapists know, is due to the fact that the long O and U vowels are articulated with the lips, while the following semi-vowel Y is articulated with the palate, which is quite distant. Thus, in order to close the vowel with a Y sound, it is necessary to create a new, short simple vowel to receive the Y. Even in English, the words toy and boy experience this phenomenon, and the exclamation “phooey!” is also reminiscent of this.
Something similar occurs when we encounter the opposite case, namely palatal vowels that naturally end with a Y (the long E and long A sounds) that are then closed with a W sound. Think about how children pronounce “eew” when expressing disgust. you would hear a phantom U sound at the end. Years ago, a major American poseq, whose last name ironically begins with a W, was considering my arguments for why in Hebrew, the vav should be pronounced like a W. After all, if a vav did not represent the W sound, how would he write his name in Hebrew? If he indeed does write it with a vav, then why does he not write his name in English with a V? Or better yet, when we encounter foreign words with consonantal W’s, why do we choose to represent them with vav? Why not with gimmel or mem, for instance? (I also now recall an embroidered parocheth at the Young Israel of Queens Valley: קווינס וואלי. Well? Which is it? Kveens Valley or Queens Walley?) He almost seemed convinced when I pointed out the following: אָבִיב and אָבִיו are not homophones. Rather, the latter is pronounced a-VEEW, which sounds almost like a-VI-u, and was just too much for this poseq to take. A sound like that seemed so foreign to the Hebrew he had known his whole life, and must be wrong. He dismissed me with a quick, “Now you’re hakn a chaynik,” and that was it. But, the truth must be told, because God’s seal is truth and His Torah is truth: In the Bible, there are many instances of the suffix consonantal vav actually being represented as a full vowel when it should close a hiriq vowel. With regards to אביו, there are a number of examples where it occurs as אָבִֽיהוּ. Similarly, אָחִיו becomes אָחִיהוּ,
נְתַתִּיו becomes נְתַתִּיהוּ,
and עֲשִיתִיו becomes עֲשִיתִיהוּ.
There are many more examples of this phenomenon.
Using the laws of Hebrew grammar, can you explain why the verb ישתחוֶה becomes וַיִּשְתַּחֲוּ when preceded by a vav-hahippuch? I can, because I allow for a connection between the semi-vowel vav and the complete vowel, but a system that assumes consonantal vav sounds like V cannot.
Also consider the names פֻוָ֖ה Puwa in Genesis 46:13 and פוּאָ֛ה Pua in I Chronicles 7:1. They are clearly the same person.
Contrary to what most believe, that in the first case the vav is an independent consonant and sounds like a V, making this name pu-VA, the dagesh in the vav is there to show you that it is part of both the “pu” syllable, i.e., a long “oo” sound as in “food” and not as in “good,” as the qubbutz would be in other contexts, and the next syllable: pu-WA. The slight variant from Chronicles confirms this. The difference between these names is like the difference between pronouncing the English word “snowing” as SNO-wing and SNOW-ing and SNOW-wing and SNO-ing. They are all very similar to each other, but no one would say SNOW-ving.
Update from 26 Teveth 5781:
I seem to have overlooked the best example right in this week’s parasha, Exodus 4:15, where we have both forms of the word meaning “his mouth,” פִּ֑יו and פִּ֔יהוּ. This illustrates a very important point regarding written languages.
The trouble with transliterating from one language to another is that no two languages share exact phonemes, or a a one-to-one correspondence between representations of shared sounds. Because we deal mostly with Hebrew and English here, we will share some pertinent examples: the words bet, bait, and bat would be approximately represented by the Modern-Hebrew pronunciation of בֶּט, and the words duck and quack are also made to rhyme when transliterated.
Similarly, the human mouth is capable of producing a wide variety of consonants and vowels, and until today no natural language can adequately account for all of them. Linguists have created a whole host of new symbols to represent all of the possible different sounds. As I wrote in my book, the Masoretes basically used the qamatz to represent a number of similar sounds that exist along a spectrum between the sounds of patah and holam, and here we have a perfect example of how our forefathers used two written forms to represent the way people said the word for “his mouth.” I claim that it was actually somewhere between PEE-hoo and PEEW, and these two variant spellings show us that God Himself, so to speak, acknowledged that our human yet holy written language could not perfectly represent that sound.
Avraham Ben Yehuda 