Talk:Hebrew/Alephbet

Pronounciation
To those concerned:

There is a glaring error on this page about the Hebrew alphabet. The Khataf-Kamatz does not make the sound of the a in father. Rather, it is a short o sound (like hope). In fact, representing the Kamatz as an a without qualification is not correct. There are two types of Kamatz: Kamatz Gadol (simple Kamatz), which sounds like the a in father and Kamatz Katan that sounds like the o in hope. This topic might be too technical to go into on this page, but they should at least be listed properly.

The best, Yonah
 * I don't know, but isn't this one that changes with the different dialects? --CocoaZen 02:35, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

An IPA pronunciation guide would be awesomely useful. And more accurate. 70.171.19.218 08:16, 5 November 2005 (UTC)
 * See Template talk:IPA --Derbeth 09:20, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

-
 * kamatz-katan / hataph-kamatz (same thing), is not a so-called short o like in hope!!!. Hope is a long o like So Go.  kamatz katan is like (british not american accent) top, boris, hop(no e, not hope), dock, which is a short o. I don't know how you get that sound in american english.  Regarding The long o, like Go,So,Hope. I don't think it exists in sephardi hebrew. It is the ashkenazi cholem. A cholem is marked as a dot in the upper left hand corner of any letter. Note no other vowels use dots that go above a letter. But the letter(s) Shin and Sin, have dots that go above.   Shin has a dot on the top right corner. Sin on the top left corner. So, if you see the letter shin/sin with 2 dots, one on the top right, one on the top left. It is a Shin with a cholem.


 * In ashkenazi hebrew, kamatz is always like o in top, boris (british accent, not american accent).


 * In sephardi hebrew, it depends. It always looks the same - like a T. But according to a rule. Sometimes it is Ah like I thnk Thus, and books say Bar,Far. Other time it is o like top. The ah like far is called a kamatz gadol. The o like top, is a kamatz katan a.k.a  kamatz hatuph(I may have misspelt this word hatuph. I would have to see it in hebrew).  The kamatz gadol in sound is really to be distinguished from the Patach. which as Ah as in cat.


 * In Modern Hebrew pronunciation - which is a mixture of sephardi,and ashkenazi. There is one kamatz, pronounced like the sephardi kamatz gadol - far.

jameshanley/jameshanley39 4pm, 19 May 2008 Another note to make shoudl be the variations on pronounciations (as a possible side note) such as alternate sounds, such as tet sounding like an "S" at times, etc.

One last request would be to change the font used in the examples given to show each character of the alephbet. That font, even to me, seems very akward. The Shin, for example looks practicially closed on the top and not like a shin, the Chet looks like a greek Pi, the dagesh marks are not even IN the letters that they should be but beside them, and don't even get me started on that crazy final nun.

Hope someone else sees my point and takes the needed steps to clarify. 167.1.120.20deselect

The letter ה in hebrew is spelled הא = he (E like in help), not האי = hey. Even in Israel a lot of people doesn't says he, so let's stop this awful mistake right here. 89.138.121.84 16:48, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

Added IPA, needs revisions
Ok, so I added IPA to the page. All I had to go on was the text as presented and a little help from my Ashkenazi friend (note resh). It would be neat if differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic pronunciation could be represented. Someone correct my mistakes quick! Dancxjo 01:16, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Thank you! --CocoaZen 02:35, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

[X] versus [x]
The notes seemed to indicate that while chet is [X] (uvular), khaf should be velar [x], yet the transliteration seems to ignore this. Can someone confirm this? Dancxjo 01:16, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
 * In modern "Europenized" Hebrew, both "Chet" and "Khaf" are uvular, i.e. [χ] in IPA. Nonetheless, if you pronounce it velarly, i.e. [x], no one would notice the difference. The "classical" Arabized Hebrew makes a distinction between "Chet" - [ħ] (pharyngeal), and "Khaf" - [x]/[χ] (either velar or uvular). 88.155.194.120 21:11, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

A note on the funky dagesh misalignment
This seems to be a browser issue with the tables. It works just fine in Firefox but not in Safari. Dancxjo 01:16, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Teaching step-by-step
I would really like to see lessons teaching how to read and write Hebrew step-by-step. It's hard to learn from an overview of letters. Lack of examples is another problem, but even if there were examples afterwards the learning situation would be far from perfect because the student would still have to memorise all letters at once in order to be able to begin practising.

What I have found really useful when learning non-Latin alphabets is a "divide and conquer" method that introduces few letters at a time and offers example words for practise immediately after each letter / each set of letters. What's even better is if those example words are understandable without prior knowledge of the language, that is, international words. For example: names of countries, cities or famous people (if their name isn't significantly different in Hebrew than in English), common personal names, Hebrew words that have entered English, English words that are used in Hebrew, words that both Hebrew and English have derived from Greek or Latin... The advantage of using these words is that students will be able to quickly see their own progress and the whole learning process becomes as fascinating as solving a puzzle. See the "Read Write and Pronounce Greek" lessons in the Modern Greek Wikibook for an example, or this external page on Cyrillic.

If you'd like to try this approach for teaching how to write Hebrew, I'd be glad to help you, even though I can't read Hebrew yet. I'd like to learn it though and I have learned to read quite a few scripts already. Just create a big list of suitable words on a planning page like Modern Greek/Writing lessons plan, answer me here and I'll try to find an optimal order for letters.

Thanks for your efforts to teach a language that is hard to find in European schools!

Junesun 17:05, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

P.S.: If there's somebody generally unsure about how to create good language lessons, I really recommend reading the following two pages about it: Authoring Foreign Language Textbooks and Authoring Foreign Language Textbooks/Bite-sized language lessons.

Final Pe
The table shows "Final Pe" as the final form of Pe with a dagesh added. This is not correct. In Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew, no word ever ends with a "P" sound, so the final form of Fe is always without a dagesh (unlike final Khaf, which can take a dagesh, e.g. Numbers 6:25). In Modern Hebrew, words can end with a "P" sound if they are foreign in origin (lo'aziot). In such case, to emphasize the highly irregular pronunciation, the non-final form is used (with a dagesh) at the end of the word. A commonly encountered example is ketchup, which is written (copied off a bottle from my refrigerator). I don't know how much of this you want to go into in the first lesson, but you should take out the Final-Pe-with-a-dagesh, as there is no such usage.


 * In the expanded aleph-bet lessons (Hebrew/Aleph-Bet), pe is covered in one of the lessons that has not been created yet (Hebrew/Aleph-Bet9), should we put this there? --CocoaZen 02:26, 22 October 2006 (UTC)