Chanuka, oy, Khanike

by ALEX WEISER

If you google the Jewish festival of lights Ḥanukkah, you’ll find descriptions of it which include more than a half dozen different spellings of the word. Why would such a common word have so many spellings, and which one is correct? 

This issue comes up often in the Jewish world. Words in Jewish languages such as Hebrew and Yiddish are written using the Hebrew alphabet, and as Jews have lived throughout the world in Diaspora, Hebrew words have weathered pronunciation changes and transliteration into a variety of different dialects and alphabets. In the original Hebrew the holiday is spelled חנוכּה. 

This provides a few challenges for the native English speaker transliterating this word. The first letter ח is pronounced as “kh,” and there is no such corresponding letter in English. Often this is simply transliterated as “h,” however we lose a bit of the sound when we do that. YIVO’s transliteration system would write this as “kh,” but you will also commonly find anglicized Hebrew and Yiddish words written with a “ch” for this sound. YIVO’s transliteration avoids this because ch could also be pronounced as it is in the word children. Another solution writes the letter as ḥ.

When you add these challenges of transliteration, the pronunciation shifts transliteration can initiate, as well as other organic shifts in dialect and pronunciation, the story gets yet more complicated. In Yiddish, for example, we pronounce this word as khanike.

Alex Weiser is YIVO’s Programs Manager.