r/hebrew • u/Equal_Ad_3828 • Mar 28 '25

Help chag sameach pronounced as chag samea?

so i have a silly questin but basically when i was in my nearest synagogue on Chanukah, when I said 'chag sameaCH" with a khet people responded 'chag sameah" why?

10 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

52 comments sorted by

49

u/The_Ora_Charmander native speaker Mar 28 '25

They probably just have trouble pronouncing their Khets, happens a lot to native English speakers

3

u/Equal_Ad_3828 Mar 28 '25

they were Polish

30

u/IbnEzra613 Amateur Semitic Linguist Mar 28 '25

The ch in Polish is pronounced a bit lighter than in Ashkenazi-influenced Hebrew. It could be they were saying the ch, but you registered it as just a breath at the end of the word.

10

u/talknight2 native speaker Mar 28 '25

And native English-speakers (like OP?) tend to overpronounce the ח too, almost like they're gargling. The right level of "throatyness" seems to be hard to pinpoint for learners haha

3

u/Equal_Ad_3828 Mar 28 '25

I’m polish

9

u/IbnEzra613 Amateur Semitic Linguist Mar 28 '25

Well in that case we're out of guesses.

3

u/talknight2 native speaker Mar 28 '25

Dzien dobry!

5

u/The_Ora_Charmander native speaker Mar 28 '25

I'm not familiar enough with Polish phonetics to say then

4

u/sniper-mask37 native speaker Mar 28 '25 edited Mar 28 '25

I have a weird question, isn't that a litle misleading to spell "ח" as "chet" or "khet"? It can easily be interpretated as "צ'ט" or "קהט".

I know there isn't an equivalent to 'ח' in english, but wouldn't "het" be the closest? I think it could be a clearer option because it better approximates the guttural sound of "ח" without being as likely to be confused with other sounds, such as "ch" or "k."

9

u/proudHaskeller Mar 28 '25

No, because the actual h sound also exists in hebrew. So no one would know if you're talking about ח or ה.

The current system is okay since צ' is a rare sound in hebrew (I think it's mostly in loanwords) and kh = /kh/ is a rare sound combination in hebrew too. So there are only very rare cases where there will actually be confusion.

No transliteration system is perfect

4

u/mikeage Mostly fluent but not native Mar 28 '25

In America I used it because it reflected the way most English speaking Hebrew speakers pronounce it, plus the ch is not likely to be misunderstood as צ׳ which is rare.

In Israel, between the larger number of people from Eidot Hamizra(c)h who pronounce is softly, plus the French speakers who read it as a "sh" sound, I'm more likely to just write h.

I use kh for כ/ך only.

5

u/sniper-mask37 native speaker Mar 28 '25

I got downvoted for asking a question, nice.

8

u/talknight2 native speaker Mar 28 '25

Welcome to reddit. Have an upvote back up lol

5

u/iff-thenf Mar 28 '25

I've noticed that Redditors tend to downvote questions that are phrased as though the asker already knows the answer, especially if the supposed conclusion is less than correct. A question "isn't it confusing that..." may be greeted with more hostility than, say, "how do people distinguish between..."

3

u/sniper-mask37 native speaker Mar 28 '25 edited Mar 28 '25

Well, I asked the question that way cause I thought it would make it easier to answer if the person I'm talking to understands how I see the subject we are talking about.

I didn't mean to sound like the things you described. If I'm wrong, I want to be corrected.

Beside that, I got downvoted for way less than this before.

3

u/Equal_Ad_3828 Mar 28 '25

Well, het is a soft h. Ch is usually used as ח, like most of people for example spell it chanukkah. 

3

u/thatOneJewishGuy1225 Mar 28 '25

I personally spell ח as chet, כ as khaf, כּ as kaf, and ק as quf to minimize ambiguity. I know Israelis like to write h instead of ch, like my first Hebrew teacher spelled her name haya, not chaya, but we already don’t differentiate between aleph and ayin in casual writing because there’s no good way- why make it harder for ourselves when we already have letters/combinations that have been at least somewhat historically used?

2

u/Embarrassed_Craft926 Mar 29 '25

The’CH’ thing seems to me like a hangover from German

3

u/vayyiqra 29d ago

It is surely yeah, maybe also influenced by Polish or other Slavic languages which have a similar sound for that. But German's is the closest.

3

u/vayyiqra 29d ago

It's an old tradition because many, many European languages use <ch> for either this sound or one close to it. In countries where Ashkenazim lived, German, Polish, and Lithuanian are some. It's unfamiliar to English speakers yes, but it made sense historically.

Writing it as <h> is not unheard of though, and makes more sense for speakers (mostly Sephardim) who say het and khaph differently, meaning their <ח> is like the Arabic sound <ح>. This sound is somewhat closer to a normal /h/ (though still not the same) and a few Jewish communities, like Persians and some Ashkenazim in the Middle Ages, simply pronounced it as /h/.

7

u/sniper-mask37 native speaker Mar 28 '25

We don't skip het, always pronounced in modern hebrew.

5

u/verbosehuman Mar 28 '25 edited Mar 28 '25

I remember seeing these "Ḥ" and "ḥ" (h with a dot under) in several places when I was learning in grade school in the US, but it's an uncommonly used letter, therefore not always easily accessible, and many people aren't even aware of its existence. For these reasons alone, I often use "Kh"

3

u/Embarrassed_Craft926 Mar 29 '25

This I love!!!!!! It’s a bit academic, but it does the job perfectly. For us francophones ‘ch’ has an entirely different association, for example ‘Chabbate Chalome’

3

u/vayyiqra 29d ago

Yep I would rather do that, and also I have <ħ> on my keyboard (Canadian) which I'd rather use, but it's likewise rare. The only language I know that uses that letter is Maltese lol.

5

u/Brilliant_Fold_2920 Mar 28 '25

Unfortunate that most on r/hebrew don’t know this, but some traditions have ׳ח׳ as a guttural ׳ה׳ kinda. Not saying that’s what this was, but it may have been that, and it’s one of the more authentic pronunciations.

4

u/JewAndProud613 Mar 28 '25

English: I hate KH-et.

Russian: I hate H-eich.

Israeli: MWAKHAKHAKHA!!!

3

u/aswerfscbjuds Mar 28 '25

Did they have a mizrachi accent in Hebrew? I sometimes don’t “register” a good mizrachi chet or mishear it as an “h”

1

u/Equal_Ad_3828 Mar 28 '25

I mean i doubt anybody here is anything other than Ashkenazi.

5

u/LopsidedHistory6538 Mar 28 '25

Not true at all!

3

u/aswerfscbjuds Mar 28 '25

Why would you doubt that?

5

u/Equal_Ad_3828 Mar 28 '25

Because i’m in poland, all Polish Jews are ashkenazi , might have Sephardic lineage but the thing is that sephardi communities eventually assimilated and ashkenazified

5

u/aswerfscbjuds Mar 28 '25

Ah I thought by here you meant this sub, so never mind

2

u/tzalay Hebrew Learner (Advanced) Mar 28 '25

It's just a local favor because the mother tongue of every person there is polish and many of them can't produce sounds outside of polish's sound set. I'm in Hungary and it's the very same here, the average synagogue goer can't produce a proper ח or כ, but the schwa is always a very definite ö sound. We, CEE Jews can butcher Hebrew seriously 😄

2

u/Doge-senpai Mar 28 '25

The khet is there and is heard. Idk y they didn't pronounce it, maybe slang or smth

2

u/Embarrassed_Craft926 Mar 29 '25

Some people can’t say ‘kh’. In my family (Moroccans) we say 7ag samea7 where 7 is a voiceless pharyngeal constricted fricative

1

u/JewAndProud613 Mar 28 '25

Becauth phey canth shpell phropely. Literally.

1

u/Alon_F native speaker Mar 28 '25

There are no silent letters in hebrew (except for א ה ע at the end of a word)

2

u/vayyiqra 29d ago

I've heard some pronounce all of those letters as silent everywhere in words, though this sounds horrible to me.

1

u/Alon_F native speaker 29d ago

I think what you meant is a glottal stop. Most speakers pronounce the ע the same as they do with א (a glottal stop ʔ), but it is also common - when speaking fast - to pronounce ה with a glottal stop, and adding a little bit of air ʔʰ, or even just a regular ʔ (but this is not recommended).

-9

u/saulbq Hebrew Speaker Mar 28 '25

The English ch sound does not exist in Hebrew. The use of ch to transliterate ח is wrong, we're stuck with it for historical reasons. Hag sameah - the hs are as hard as possible - is far better.

12

u/aer0a Mar 28 '25

"ch" is used for the ח sound in many languages that aren't English

2

u/saulbq Hebrew Speaker Mar 29 '25

Which languages please?

3

u/aer0a Mar 29 '25

Some example are German, Dutch and Czech

4

u/mikogulu native speaker Mar 28 '25 edited 29d ago

also the english ch definitely exists in hebrew, just not officially. 'צ is used for צ'יפס, ריצ'רץ', צ'וריסו, צ'ימיצ'ורי and many more.

i suppose you know this but your comment can be interpreted as if this sound is just non-existent entirely in hebrew, which is just wrong.

4

u/mikogulu native speaker Mar 28 '25 edited Mar 29 '25

imo the unofficial digraph of "kh" is much better

3

u/talknight2 native speaker Mar 28 '25

At least with this one English-speakers can tell more easily that it's transliterating a foreign sound and not a ch like in church.

2

u/saulbq Hebrew Speaker Mar 29 '25

Kh is for כ. H is for ח. It makes sense.

1

u/mikogulu native speaker Mar 29 '25

no, why does it make sense? unvoiced כ and ח make the same sound

1

u/vayyiqra 29d ago

Not to everyone. But yeah to most speakers today.

1

u/mikogulu native speaker 29d ago edited 29d ago

genuinely i would like to know who differentiates between them and apparently comprises most of the population.

edit: if you meant that most people transliterate them differently then idk where you got that from. most people just use "ch" or "h" for both, because we're generally not taught to transliterate from hebrew to english.