Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 9/10/05, Tyler Williams  wrote:
> Thanks Solomon,

> [quoting Solomon Landers]
> 
> Or Kittel may represent the Ashkenazi pronunciation ("kof"), 
> whereas the Israeli pronunciation is Sephardi ("kaf").
> 

Then it would be wrong on the Ashkenazi pronunciation too!  The
letter, and word, kaph has a patah (a qamats only as a pausal
form), and so is a short "a".  This is probably why the Greek reads
kappa, which if taken from Phoenician would represent a sound
not affected by the shift from "long a" to "o" which is visible in the 
previous letter iota.   The same rule takes effect also in the 
Ashkenazi pronunciation of the sound.  An example web page is 
that shows this is: http://www.torahscribe.com/letters.htm
(I also found web pages that claim the letter is "Chof" or 
something to that effect, though...)

Peter Kirk wrote:
> So, what is the Ashkenazi pronunciation of the letter ק qof or
> qoph? And what is Kittel's rendering? Do Ashkenazis distinguish 
> the sounds of the letters כ kaf and ק qof?

Both Ashkenazis and Israelis distinguish the letters only by their 
sound without a dagesh.  As to the names of the letters, the names 
are clearly distinguishable because of the "short a"/"long a" 
difference.

Yitzhak Sapir