Q&A: Did the Modern Hebrew revivers want the Sephardic accent to become the new Hebrew accent, or a blend of the Ashkenazi and Sephardi accents?

The “Language Committee” of the early Zionist period (precursor to the Academy of Hebrew Language) debated this topic at length, along with teachers of the Hebrew schools. The majority opinion was that the Sephardi pronunciation was preferable, for several reasons:

Q&A: In Hebrew, how is it possible to discern when to pronounce shva as /e/ or not at all?

For the sake of illustration, in this answer I shall represent the shva as a colon in the middle of the word (:). There are four rules for determining whether a shva is na (‘moving’) or naḥ (‘resting’):

Ten simple things every Westerner should know about Arabic

Fed up with repeated mispronunciation of Arabic names and words in Western media, I offer this simple primer of ten things that every Westerner (esp. broadcasters) should know about Arabic names and terms:

The perils of Ashkenazi pronunciation

Hebrew pronunciation among Diaspora communities is broadly divided between the Ashkenazis (communities originally from Central and Eastern Europe) and everyone else – i.e., Sephardis, the Mesopotamian communities (Iraq, Iran), Yemenites, etc.

The difference lies mainly in the pronunciation of the Hebrew letter tav, and a vowel known as kamatz: in Ashkenazi pronunciation, the tav is pronounced like an /s/, and the kamatz is pronounced /ô/. In other communities, the tav is pronounced /t/† and the kamatz is /ah/, respectively.