heth n : the 8th letter of the Hebrew alphabet

English

Noun

1. The eighth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, ח.

''For other uses, see Heth (disambiguation).

or (also spelled Khet, Kheth, Chet, Cheth, Het, or Heth) is the reconstructed name of the eighth letter of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, continued in descended Semitic alphabets as Phoenician !rowspan=2|RashiScript |- !|Serif !! Sans-serif !! Monospaced |- |width=20%|ח |width=20%|ח |width=20%|ח |width=20%||width=20%||}

Pronunciation

In Modern Israeli Hebrew, the letter Khet usually has the sound value of a voiceless uvular fricative (/χ/), due to European influence. It may also be pronounced as a voiceless pharyngeal fricative (/ħ/) among Mizrahim (especially among the older generation and popular Mizrahi singers), in accordance with oriental Jewish traditions.

Chet is one of three letters that can take a vowel at the end of a word. Normally, the vowel is patach gnuva, and when it comes under Chet at the end of a word, the combination is pronounced /αx/ rather than /xα/.

Variations

Chet, along with Aleph, Ayin, Resh, and He, cannot receive a dagesh. As pharyngeal fricatives are difficult for most English speakers to pronounce, loanwords are usually Anglicized to have /h/. Thus challah (חלה), pronounced by native Hebrew speakers as /xala/ or /ħala/ is pronounced /halə/ by most English speakers, who cannot often perceive the difference between [h] and [ħ].

Significance

In gematria, Chet represents the number eight, and when used at the beginning of Hebrew years, it means 8000 (i.e. חתשנד in numbers would be the date 8754).

In chat rooms and online forums, the letter Chet repeated denotes laughter, similar to the English LOL.

Arabic a

The letter is named a, and is written in several ways depending in its position in the word: The ability to pronounce a as is often used as a shibboleth to distinguish Arabic-speakers from non-Arabic-speakers; in particular, pronunciation of the letter as a voiceless velar fricative is seen as a hallmark of Ashkenazi Jews and Greeks.