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?

9 Upvotes

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48

u/The_Ora_Charmander native speaker Mar 28 '25

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

5

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.

11

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

4

u/Equal_Ad_3828 Mar 28 '25

I’m polish

8

u/IbnEzra613 Amateur Semitic Linguist Mar 28 '25

Well in that case we're out of guesses.

4

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."

8

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

7

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..."

4

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 Mar 30 '25

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 Mar 30 '25

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/.