Patach
Pataḥ | |
ַ | |
IPA | [a] or [ä] |
Transliteration | a |
English approximation | far |
Same sound | qamatz
|
Example | |
גַּם | |
The word for also in Hebrew, gam. The first and only vowel (under Gimel, the horizontal line) is a pataḥ. | |
Other Niqqud | |
Sin/Shin Dot
|
Pataḥ (
In
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 consisting of two yods, ײַ, is used to represent the diphthong [aj].
Pronunciation
The following table contains the pronunciation and transliteration of the different pataḥs in reconstructed historical forms and dialects using the International Phonetic Alphabet.
The letters
Symbol | Name | Pronunciation | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Israeli
|
Ashkenazi | Sephardi
|
Yemenite
|
Tiberian | Reconstructed | |||
Mishnaic | Biblical | |||||||
בַ | Pataḥ | [a] | [ä] | [ä] | [a] | [a, aː] | [a] | [a] |
בַא, בַה | Pataḥ male | [a] | [ä] | [ä] | [a] | [aː] | [a] | [a] |
חֲ | Ḥaṭaf pataḥ | [a] | [ä] | [ä] | [a] | [ă] | [a] | [a] |
A pataḥ on a letter ח, ע, or הּ (that is, ה with a dot (mappiq) in it) at the end of a word is sounded before the letter, and not after. Thus, נֹחַ (
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.
Vowel comparison table | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Vowel Length
|
IPA
|
Transliteration | English approximation | ||
Long | Short | Very short | |||
ָ | ַ | ֲ | [a] | a | spa |
Qamatz
|
Pataḥ | Reduced pataḥ |
Unicode encoding
Glyph | Unicode | Name |
---|---|---|
ַ | U+05B7 | PATAH |
ֲ | U+05B2 | HATAF PATAH |
See also
- Niqqud
- Qamatz
- Fathah, the related diacritic in Arabic