More on the 'ayin (ngayin):I don't dispute the respected opinions and scholarship of our learned members Aron Sterk and Catriel Ceballos. Indeed, the majority of modern scholarship attributes the velar nasal (or palatal nasal of the French Portuguese) pronunciation of the 'ayin to a borrowing of the Portuguese Jews from the Italian in the 17th c. But my point has been and continues to be that this is not necessarily so. The transliteration of NG is late. It comes at a time that Portuguese Jews are already in Italy. The direction of the borrowing is not at all clear. Nasalization is a linguistic feature in Portuguese not in Italian. The pronunciation of vowels to native Portuguese speakers in the 17th c. or earlier is not at all clear to me. It is possible that the trascription of an "a" or an "h" could very well reflect a velar nasal phoneme in many instances. (To use a bad example - but one which can be understood by all - ask a Portuguese speaker to pronounce the name of the Brazillian city of Sao Paolo - nasal phonemes are common in Portuguese and are often present without trascription of a latin letter N or NG or NGH. A nasal phoneme could easily have been pronounced for 'ayin in the 17th c. by native Portuguese speakers even without seeing N or NG or NGH in their teffilot books.)The original Iberian pronunciation of the 'ayin is not so clearly known. There ARE indeed some scholars who believe that the nasal pronunciation of the ngayin is an original Iberian pronunciation. This is not merely a "folk" belief. For example see - Paul Wexler.