Why are there so many spellings of Chanukah, and which one is right?
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- Опубліковано 18 гру 2022
- In this video I definitively settle the disagreement about how to spell the winter holiday that lasts eight nights. You're welcome, everybody!
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Website: www.languagejones.com
Love the video. The best way to spell Hanukah is differently each time.
I did exactly that in the closed captions!
this could not be more correct
Chaotic. Yay.
@@languagejones6784i always watch with captions (because of sensory processing disorder) and I appreciate people who make using the feature a little treat so much. I noticed you changed the spelling and giggled every time. Thank you !
Happy Ханука!
My favourite-and unambiguous-spelling? Ханука. Done. :)))
Dutch has an official spelling: Chanoeka; het Chanoeka. It is a neutral word, and the capital is obligatory.
I love Dutch spelling conventions -- they make so much sense once you know the rules. Although I do wish it were Ganoeka.
@@languagejones6784 me too! I am in favour of simple solutions...😄.
Well, in transliteration we also have to make a distinction between the chet and gimmel
Taylor, thank you for this! I am going to show it to my adult Hebrew class… you put it so much better than I ever could (even after 20 years as a rabbi!) Chag urim sameach!
I'm flattered! jag sameaj! 😂
I didn't know you were jewish? Cool video. The spelling of Yarmulke is the most frustrating for me definitely. Lol
That will actually get a mention in a video I'm working on, on disappearing (and intrusive) "r"!
Heh, that’s why my family (meaning me & my kids) switched to saying “kippah!” More explanations needed for non Jews, easier to say! 😁
I like Chanukah, it’s easy for us pretentious Irish speakers who absolutely pronounce the Ch. We pronounce lake as Loch(k) and Bach and Van Gogh as Bach(k) and Van Gogh(k) and never Van-Go 😞
חג שמח, Language Zaddy!
When I was a kid I learnt the general rule of thumb that anything is right as long as it has 8 letters (and generally can be pronounced as חנוכה I suppose)
Being a Spanish speaker & knowing some Latino Jews where I live, I only ever saw it spelled like “Jánuca” in Spanish. What I’m curious about is why the Hebrew “H” sound isn’t written as the Arabic “Kh” or maybe the letter it transliterates to in Cyrillic: “X”
Anyhow, I’ve always spelled it “Hanukkah” when writing in English
The Hebrew letter ח is supposed to be pronounced like the Arabic letter ح but Ashkenazim pronounce it like خ because the sound doesn't exist in Yiddish
I tend to see it mostly written with a H at the start of words as well as in things in later decades (anecdotally). I think as the world has become smaller, more people know the standard american "ch" is just plain wrong for nearly all Hebrew transliterations/feels funny. A lot of Hayim for the name and fewer Chaim's, for example. My guess about why we don't use a Kh is because the chet ח is not actually the German ch but also in modern Hebrew it is rarely the arabic ح with or without dot...it sort of fluctuates depending on the speaker. While I'd say 85% of folks pronounce it just a hard H, a lot of people sometimes have differentiation depending on cultural background and the words. Ultimately, my guess is it's a factor of historical development of modern Hebrew and the English speaking world (similar to the video author's point about the lack of an English language authoritarian body like French has). I think having a lot of medieval and modern Hebrew first filtered through Yiddish and German before English resulted in some nonstandard transliterations that otherwise might be normal today; for example, you often see Qabbalah or Quran but still definitely see Kabbalah--but these are all the same letter, regardless of language. In Hebrew, the standard practice is to use a Q and not a K, however, for the qof/quf ק , but I also think this lends itself to the simple fact that the name of the letter itself was stylized this way thankfully rather than something ridiculous like coof or koof or kewf (of note, the Q sound is not a real q, it is historically an "extra strong" K, sort of like but a guttral Qof in Arabic, even though again not pronounced as such by the majority of modern Hebrew speakers...and even though all hard C/Q/K foreign sounds from english are most properly transliterated into modern Hebrew using the Qof ).
i'd also wager that it people prefer letters that look similar. the H is similar to ח and the q is directly related and similar to the ק
I hadn't seen the Kh before. It makes more sense than Ch which we already associate with a sound. I like Ḥ but there's no easy way to imput it on English Keyboards.
What an accidental discovery last night! A fellow member of the tribe and fellow Trekkie! I also love the tech references, I'm not a programmer/dev, did it in school, so the metaphors about pointers and instatiating are awesome for me.
It's funny, I was born in Mexico and moved to Canada at a young age and after spending more time speaking Hebrew than Spanish, my Spanish J sounds more like a Chet 😝but it never occurred to me to write Hebrew words in Spanish 🙂 Where I live I would say that Chanukah is most common with Hanukkah a close second, especially for people who don't speak Hebrew. The album "Hanukkah Rocks" has a track called "How Do You Spell Channukkahh" 😀
למה דיברת יותר עברית מספרדית??
You're a Canadian Jew? A Chanuk?
I'm sorry. Lol.
I would spell it janucá.
This is interesting. I live in Manchester, UK which has the second largest Jewish community outside of London. There are three synagogues just within a ten minute walk from my house. So I checked out the websites of some of the Manchester synagogues. Some spell it Chanukah others spell it Hanukkah. But the clear majority spell it Chanukah. I wanted to see if the Ultra Orthodox used a different spelling to the Reform/Liberal but they're not so hot on websites.
In french you might read "hannoucca", but most importantly, you might hear it beginning with a silent h.
Do you have a source for Spaniards spelling Chanukah Janice? As far as I can tell it's written Janucá
New favorite channel! Happy (belated) Khanike!
glad that anders was able to see the error in their ways lol fun video as always and happy khahnika and happy holidays lol
Thanks for the cool video! It was short and awesome.
I can't tell when or when I first encountered the « 'h » transliteration, but it's definitely my favourite way of writing the « X » sound - as a French native, in French "standard" transliteration : 'Hanoucca, 'Hag Saméa'h, for instance.
My ancient greek lessons most probably biased me towards this notation via the δασὺ πνεῦμα / rough breathing « ◌̔ » diacritical mark (more specifically in the rho « Ῥ ῥ » case)
Many thanks for your insight!
In Dutch you say ganoeka, with a g, pronounced like the ch in lochness. and an oe as in shoe. and you write chanoeka. And all the other Yiddish words you use are used in Dutch too, specially in Mokum ( = Amsterdam ).
I personally tend to prefer "Hanukkah" because while it might not be totally accurate to the Hebrew, it is close enough and is easy to read since I don't have to remember that half the letters are pronounced differently than normal.
The only correct spelling חֲנֻכָּה
Very nice video and funny too!! Hope the comments help with the youtube algorithm, so that your channel can grow.
I decided pretty early to spell ח as hh.
So using Latin alphabet I usually spell it as Hhanukah, or Hhanucah.
Xanuka, though I know it'll never catch on.
Can’t you spell it חנוכה if you leave out the niqud?
Yes.
@languagejones6784 you missed a great opportunity to call your VIP Paul Chxjh! (Clearing throat noise)
Always spelled it “Chanukah” because that’s how my east coast Ashkenazi conservative (religiously, not politically except for my father, notable in the family for voting for Nixon…twice!) family of origin spelled it. My grandparents and great grandparents were Yiddish speakers, but deliberately chose not to pass that on to my parents 🤨, so I have only the standard smattering of my cultural upbringing. (Favorite phrase, learned as a teenager: “a bissel farshnushkid”… which I’m just realizing I don’t think I’ve ever written out, so I hope the transliteration works!)
As for latkes, learned from my mom. They included grated onion (which I now have to leave out, can’t eat those anymore), grated (not shredded!) potatoes and other stuff, all done by eye and feel. We didn’t have sufganyot when I was growing up, but my kids got me into including them (our little branch of the family became west coast lefty seculars who were attached to culture but not religion; my kids had a number of friends from Israeli families and brought home food & traditions to add). One of the nicest moments I had a few years ago was when each of my three grown kids called me during Chanukah to ask how I made the latkes they remembered! Jewish mom win, I guess ☺️- especially since I was never much of a cook except for those, our Pesach meals, and the rugelach handed down through our family for generations (single best cookie on the planet, and I can prove it!).
You convinced me.
Khanookuh it is!
"Janice" look like either JAN-iss or KHA-nee-they to me :).
Damn it!
I've been spelling it חנוכה, with a Vav.
Is that wrong?
בעברית מנוקדת (כתיב מנוקד), נכון לכתוב "חֲנֻכָּה". אבל בכתיב מלא (כתיב חסר ניקוד), נכון לכתוב "חנוכה".
my personal favorite is ḥanukkah. the dot under the h makes it more clear that it is /χ/ not /h/ (a mistake i find particularly annoying even though I know may english speakers literally cannot pronounce it correctly) and because the rest of it is just how its spelled most often whether the beginning is kh ch h or something else.
It's /ħ/
Oh shit, I didn't know that sound goes at the front of that word. I mostly heard it spoken on American television by people who couldn't pronounce (thing my south African parents called a Dutch "g").
I'm surprised you used schmuck as a Yiddish example because I always just assumed that Yiddish speakers were using the straight up German word for jewelry... Because the insult is calling someone a ball sack
Lots of the Yiddish insults English speakers know are repurposing of Germanic words in Yiddish…shlong 🐍 being a perfect example
Great video... but a couple questions. Why the second vowel is sometimes 'i' sometimes 'u', is that another hebrew v yiddish thing? And why Janice? All the other transliterations have [k] as the last consonant, so why not Janica or Janique in Spanish?
1. In some Yiddish dialects "u" becomes "i"
2. I think it was a misspelling
...Huh?
Pardon: Chuh?
Kidding aside, what an interesting video. Smarter and more aware every day.
I spell it Hadouken
Now we know who Janice is, who's that Hannah Carr? 😂
Where's the Maigret book?
Haven’t watched the video yet, but as an Israeli, it’s either “khanukah” or “khanuka”
For me it's ħanukka
I forgot to say....
My grandmother made the world's best latki* ... with minced onion and eaten with sour cream.
*One latka and two+ latki. No dual involved as it's a feminine noun, like 'szmata'.
guys its the House M. D. dude
It is NOT apple sauce OR sour cream ...
The international pronunciation of X is new to me. In standard Pinyin X is more a mid-tounge Sh like Q being a mid-tounge Ch.
Trying to standardize sounds to Roman letters is like taming a hydra!
☝️ Obviously it's Weihnuka. 🙈
Anyways, wouldn't the question simply be what the best transcription of Hebrew would be? ... That being said I feel that for Hebrew (and also Russian and Greek) everybody does their own thing. It's much easier for languages for Eastern languages where the seems to be some sort of consensus...
My wife is Jewish and we have been living in Korea for a decade. I like to mix kimchi into my instant latke batter.
Xanuka
Do you speak Hebrew?!? I’ve been learning the language for 8 years now.
Hmm... Do I want sour cream or bitter disappointment and sadness?
I think you're using the wrong apples
It's spelled 7anukah btw
I've always spelled it as Channukkah, mostly because I want an almost finnish number of letters 😂 also people who put applesauce on are monsters
Tov meod.
I think that's Heblish.
Well, 'ch' is the most commonly used spelling for IPA /X/ so I go with that. The 'a' isn't long so technically the 'n' should be doubled. The next consonant is NOT followed by 'i ' or 'e' so theoretically it should be a 'c'. ....And all that does is add to the confusion.
ASL isn't any better. If you ask a Deaf person what the sign for 'menorah', the invariable say, "It's the sign for 'Channuca' (lame pun intended) with the palms flipped in the opposite direction. However that clarifies exactly nothing as half the Deaf people sign 'Channuca' with the palms inward and half outward. So everyone just does whatever and nobody gets confused for the same reason nobody gets confused with 'pair', 'pear', or 'pare'.
Transliteration nightmare? Do you have any idea how many different spellings have been used over the past 150 years for the last name of the guy who wrote the 1812 Overture? And I'm just talking about works in English.
I'll never stop reading Chanukah with an English ch, even though I speak Hebrew and know some German.
And chag is even worse.
And Okcupid used to assault my eyes with the notification "Add some Charif 🌶️ to your life"
🤢
I disagree that it's the least important Jewish holiday. In fact, it's the only one that commemorates an event that undisputably occurred (albeit in an exaggerated way to make it religious). It's true that it was on the verge of disappearing before Zionism gave it a more modern meaning.
Chanukah or Chanuka.
The correct spelling is חנוכה
That’s even not uncontroversial - you r chosen matres lectionis! Others would argue the vav is superfluous and it should be חנכה (even though the final hey is also a mater lectionis, just older)
@@languagejones6784I think you should write this way only when you write it with niqqud
שלמזל is a word used in Yiddish, and to an extent, certain Israeli populations
Khanukah
It's Hanukká, and it's bimuelos, not paczkes.
Janice? That's not Spanish!
I prefer guangming jie
“光明节”就更好！
Also, latkes made many places in America are truly disgusting…I only eat them in Israel…in the old city there’s a great place, but I heard it closed because of the pandemic…
If the first sound was historically geminated, why not "Xhanuca"?
The closest thing in my native language as a German is [ʁ] which gives us "Ranuka"
The second consonant (k) was geminate and German has the ch sound (x) like Yiddish and Hebrew (even though the original sound in Hebrew is ħ)
@@user-elqana Sure, it's not a straight forward way to transliterate it into German, That would be "H" since [x] can't be at the beginning of a word and argubly [h] is the realization of /x/ in onset.
But my intention was to give an exotic, not serious but funny answer.
@@twipameyer1210 I don't think Germans will have a problem with pronuncing "chanucka"
@@user-elqana Sure, we don't. It's quite easy for us. I don't remember the exact phrasing but at the end of the video the question was to think of a creative way to write it. That's what I did. It's neither practical nor rational, just a thought inteded to be creative and fun.
@@twipameyer1210 okay
Xanuka