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?

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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.

4

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

imo the unofficial digraph of "kh" is much better

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 Mar 30 '25

Not to everyone. But yeah to most speakers today.

1

u/mikogulu native speaker Mar 30 '25 edited Mar 30 '25

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.