#i'm not gonna type it out though. i may struggle to maintain observance on my own but there are some lines i won't cross

[supercantaloupe]

Not on the asks list, but care to share some hebrew-knower insight?

disclaimer that i'm not really a hebrew-knower, i basically only know enough to get through synagogue services. i'm mostly useless when it comes to modern hebrew.

anyway, you're correct in that hebrew doesn't have j, as a phoneme or as a letter. hebrew has י, which is phonetically equivalent to the english y, although it also sort of functions as a vowel in certain contexts (for example חי "chai" which means life)*.

i guess part of what's tricky about transliterating is that the latin alphabet is used for so many different languages and so many of its letters are not consistent in pronunciation, whether it be between languages or even within the same language. so in english j is typically /dʒ/ while in spanish it's more like /x/ or /h/ depending on dialect, and in german and other languages it's more like /j/. to make matters more confusing of course, that hebrew י is pronounced /j/.

so there's no equivalent to english j in hebrew, but due to, like, linguistic history and hundreds of years of translating the bible, a lot of hebrew words with י in them got changed to j or i in transl(iter)ation. you see this a lot in names: יִצְחָק (yitzhak) -> isaac, יְרוּשָׁלַיִם (yerushalayim) -> jerusalem

as far as modern transliteration goes, though, i think english transliterations of hebrew generally use "y" in place of "י". using "j" would be kind of misleading to an english reader considering that "j" represents a different phoneme in english as opposed to other languages. i guess if a german speaker were transliterating hebrew it would make sense. but י in hebrew words/names getting turned into j (/dʒ/) in english is more of a translation than a transliteration.

english j (/dʒ/) can be spelled in modern hebrew but it uses a different letter. it's ג׳. which is like a hard g with a diacritic added. kind of in the same way that english g is hard but softened to /dʒ/ when followed by e or i? it's used for transliteration or loan words, though, it's not really a native hebrew phoneme.

*as a sidenote, ח is pronounced /x/, like the "ch" in german. so i guess if you wanted to piss people off you could transliterate "חי" as "jaj" lol

#sasha answers #sleepover saturday #cartridgeconverter #this is also where 'j-hovah' comes from as an english name for gd. it's an expansion of the hebrew tetragrammaton #which begins with י #i'm not gonna type it out though. i may struggle to maintain observance on my own but there are some lines i won't cross #also i do believe י is graphically ancestral to i. and by extension j because i and j were the same letter for a long time #ie that i/j in the latin alphabet were derived through greek/phonecian from hebrew י #mediterranean scripts. fascinating stuff