Transliteration and Pointing

We do not know how the Yehudit of the Bible was pronounced, though we can say two things about it with absolute certainty, because this is true of every language; that it would have been spoken in a range of accents and dialects as far apart as the English of broad Scots, rustic Devonshire, Texas drawl, northern Gujarati and Jamaican; that it would have gone through as many changes over time as has the English of Beowulf and Chaucer and Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. In all likelihood the sounds of the letters, and of the unwritten vowels, would have been akin to the Arabic that we know today, but other than those Jews who inhabited that Arab world, no one in Judaism for the past two thousand years has pronounced Yehudit that way. If they did, King David would be King Daoud, Mosheh (Moses) would be Mousa, and many familiar words would be almost unrecognisable.

The phonetic system that I have created for TheBibleNet is based on the traditional reading of Yehudit in both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities since the start of the Diaspora in 70CE, but with a preference for the Sephardic where the two are very different; and this because it is the Sephardic which has become the predominant form in modern Ivrit, and also because the Sephardic, coming as it does from the Arab world of Spain and North Africa, is likely to be closer to the original than the Germanic and Slavonic vocalisations of the Ashkenazi world.

Because there are none in the Yehudit alphabet, the text of the Yehudit Bible comes without vowels, and without punctuation – which would appear as:

bcs thr r nn n th yhdt lphbt th txt f th yhdt bbl cms wtht vwls nd wtht pncttn 

Which is very difficult to read – right? Somewhere around the 8th century CE, when Yehudit had ceased to be a spoken language for more than a thousand years, and the ability of the untrained layman to read the scriptures was at a low ebb, the Rabbis decided to create a system of dots and dashes that indicated both vowel-sounds and punctuation, unhelpfully using the same symbols for both on one occasion (the sheva), and even more unhelpfully sometimes putting both under the same letter (chataf kamets and chataf patach for example).

I also confess that I have not been absolutely consistent in my application of the dots and dashes, and this for the very simple reason that it is a good but flawed system, so it doesn't always work. This most applies to the tseyrey, or tsereh, depending on which philological school you adhere to. The word Mo'ed, for example, is spelled with a tsereh, where the word Aysh is spelled with a tseyreh, the same double-dot, the same technical name for it, but it is definitely pronounced Mo'ed and not Mo'eyd, whereas it is definitely Aysh and not Esh.

One theory postulates that the Nekudot, the pointing system that provides Yehudit with vowels - was introduced by Ezra, who with Nechem-Yah (Nehemiah) brought the Tanach into existence around 440 BCE; though it is rather more certain that it was created by Samuel le Pointeur of Bristol in the years immediately prior to the expulsion of the Jews from Britain, which was in 1290.

The table below is based, with thanks, on the website http://www.torahtots.com/alefbet/nekudot/nekudot.htm 

see them here, or hear them there

Vowel	Name	Approximate Sound
	Kametz	Sephardic "a" as in father Ashkenazic "aw" as in saw
	chataf kametz	Sephardic "a" as in father Ashkenazic "aw" as in saw
	Patach	"a" as in father
	chataf patach	"a" as in father
	segol	"e" as in egg or met
	chataf segol	"e" as in egg or met
	tsayreh	"ey" as in they
	tsayreh	"ey" as in they
	chirik chaser	"i" as in kilo
	chirik malay	"i" as in kilo
	cholam chaser	"o" as in alone
	cholam malay	"o" as in alone
	shuruk	"u" as in moon
	kubutz	"u" as in moon
	shva	At end of syllable: silent. In middle of syllable: like "a" as in alone

In my transliteration:

AY and AI are always pronounced as in HIGH (or SINAI)

EY and EI are always pronounced as in THEY 

CH is always hard (as in LOCH)

U is never pronounced as YOU, or as UMBRELLA, but always as if it were a dog barking: WOOF

E is never silent (as in "hate" in English"; it is always the E of UMBRELLA, and sometimes I have put an apostrophe before it, to make sure you didn't make the error

Those of you who read the text in Yehudit will occasionally notice letters within words that are written larger, or smaller, than the rest of that word, or even, on some occasions, reversed. No one knows why this is the case, but the tradition is to retain them, and so they are retained. A full list of all the minuscules and majuscules etc can be found here.

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