Does conservative orthography promote "phonetic denial"?

Question

Are there speech-communities that assert that the gemination (still) present in their orthography (still) exists in their pronunciation, but audio analysis does not support this assertion?

I guess this is part of a broader question of whether conservative orthography impairs phonetic awareness.

I am particularly interested in the case of pointed Biblical Hebrew. In that case no speech-community asserts that they have preserved all distinctions present in the orthography. But I wonder whether they assert that they have preserved some distinctions that in fact they have lost.

How does one even ask such a question without seeming disrespectful? I've probably failed, for which I apologize in advance. It seems to me both an important and a delicate question, to ask whether people are making the sound-distinctions they assert that they are making.

Answer 1

One should perhaps distinguish between:

1. a false perception of a phonetic distinction in someone's own speech or in the language in general
2. the feeling that a distinction does exist in the "proper" pronunciation but that speakers "corrupt" this pronunciation by merging phonemes
3. lack of awareness of certain phonetic phenomena such as vowel reduction, voicing/devoicing and sandhi

Adding to Tristan's observation about the (lack of) distinction between 'v' and 'b' in Spanish, I think one example of a false perception is the lack of a phonetic distinction between the short stressed realizations of the graphemes 'ä' and 'e' in Standard German. See the discussion here. I myself had this experience of talking to educated native speakers who tried to convince me that there was or must have been a phonetic distinction.

In the case of Hebrew, since it has not been spoken as a first language up until end of 19th century, the distinction between the different phenomena above is particularly relevant. I'm not aware of examples of false perception of a phonetic distinction, but there have indeed been cases when a wide-spread pronunciation of Hebrew was reflected upon by the more perceptive observers from within the community who noticed that it started to diverge from how Hebrew "ought to be pronounced" - see examples in Dovid Katz'es "The phonology of Ashkenazic". It is not always clear whether in these cases the critic follows a tradition which genuinely survived the phonetic merger or whether he cautiously adjusts his own pronunciation (how successfully?) despite the merger he and everyone else already had.

An example of a lack of awareness (3.) might be final devoicing and vowel reduction among some Hebrew speakers of Russian background and lack of distinction between /v/ and /b/ among speakers of Spanish background.

See also a related phenomenon when graphics influences pronunciation.