Image: A row of candles, aflame. Photo by Gil-Dekel/Pixabay.
What’s with all the crazy spelling?
Why isn’t there one right way to spell the name of that holiday that usually falls in December?
Here’s the problem: the right way to spell it is
That’s right. It’s a Hebrew word.
All the spellings you see are attempts to make the word easier for English speakers, and some of those sounds are tricky. The first letter (on the far right) makes a sound a bit like a cat spitting. I like to transliterate it as “Kh” because no one is tempted to pronounce that like the CH in “choo-choo.” However, I’ve never seen the holiday spelled Khanukah, so I don’t spell it that way either.
The rest of it is pretty straightforward, except that the one that looks like a backwards “C” has a hard K sound. For a Hebrew grammarian, that means the letter is invisibly doubled. That’s why some transliterations have one K, and some have KK.
The bottom line is that none of the English transliterations are really correct, nor can they be, because Hebrew and English are quite different. So we are stuck with approximations like Chanukah and Hanukkah.
The real answer, of course, is to learn a little Hebrew. Then you can skip the transliterations and go straight to the source!
I love Khanukah! Can’t we see if we can make it go viral? 😀
You brought my grade one teacher Sister Wilma to my mind. “Dennis it is Zd not Zee” to which I replied “why don’t we say Zedbra instead of Zebra?” She was very kind and often made me sit facing the corner “to have a talk with Jesus” 🙂
Decades later, no one can explain why the last letter of our alphabet is Zd when it’s pronounced, Zee as in Zebra. Now when I hear Hanukkah I will think “choochoo train”. Wonder if the translators at the United Nations have a lot of explaining to do.
Thank you and have a lovely holiday Rabbi Ruth