Bartender Geek

That's why I listed it as "silent, basically." However, Jews of European descent, that is, Ashkenazic Jews, do use it as a simple silent letter, which is also how it is used in modern Israeli Hebrew. Sephardic Jews tend to pronounce it as a semiglottal stop, or simply have it gutteralize the vowel. The voiced pharyngeal fricative is only used by Yemini Jews, although it's likely to be close to how it was used originally, and the cognate to 'ayin in Arabic is that way.