Pataḥ ( he, פַּתָּח ', , Biblical Hebrew: ') is a Hebrew alphabet, Hebrew niqqud vowel sign represented by a horizontal line underneath a letter. In modern Hebrew, it indicates the phoneme which is close to the "[a]" sound in the English word ''far'' and is Romanization of Hebrew, transliterated as an ''a''. In Modern Hebrew, a ' makes the same sound as a qamatz, as does the ' ( he, חֲטַף פַּתַח , "reduced "). The reduced (or ') niqqud exist for ', ', and ' which contain a ' next to it. In Yiddish orthography, a ''pataḥ'' (called ''pasekh'' in Yiddish) has two uses. The combination of pasekh with the letter aleph, אַ, is used to represent the vowel [a]; the combination of pasekh with a digraph (orthography), digraph consisting of two yodh, yods, ײַ, is used to represent the diphthong [aj].

Pronunciation

The following table contains the pronunciation and transliteration of the different s in reconstructed historical forms and dialects using the help:IPA, International Phonetic Alphabet. The pronunciation in IPA is above and the transliteration is below. The letters Beth (letter), Bet and Heth (letter), Het used in this table are only for demonstration. Any letter can be used. A ' on a letter , , or (that is, with a dot (mappiq) in it) at the end of a word is sounded ''before'' the letter, and not after. Thus, (Noah; properly transliterated as ') is pronounced in Modern Hebrew and or in Biblical Hebrew. This only occurs at the ends of words, only with pataḥ and only with these three letters. This is sometimes called a ', or "stolen" ' (more formally, "furtive "), since the sound "steals" an imaginary epenthetic consonant to make the extra syllable.

Vowel length comparison

By adding two vertical dots (''shva'') the vowel is made very short. However, these vowels lengths are not manifested in Modern Hebrew.

Pronunciation

Vowel length comparison

Unicode encoding

See also