Happy Chanukah
Happy Chanukah my friends, even though most of you aren’t Jewish, that’s ok. Just enjoy the lights. 
A lot of people in America spell Chanukah in English in different ways. Here to clean that up from yours truly, a little lesson:
In Hebrew, the holiday is spelled as such: חנוכה (Het Nun Vav Kaf He, right-to-left folks, get with the program)
Alright, got that out of the way. So, here’s how I see it. First up, we have Het. Normally I would spell this Chet, but Charmap is silly stupid, I’ll go with it for ease. This letter is pronounced like you have a furball in your throat basically. Back of throat rolling sounded along with an H. The proper way to spell this in English? Ch
Nun is just N.
Vav here is silent but what you can’t see in the spelling above is the vowels, called Nikudot. This particular vowel here is under the Vav and has the OO sound like pool. Of course, U can also be pronounced like this, so we use that in the spelling.
Next up is Kaf, this is basically a K, unless it’s a Chaf, but this one isn’t. 
Finally, there is He. The letter name is actually pronounced Hey or Hay, but Charmap spells it He. Meh. It’s silent at the end of a word, which this one is at. Normally, it’s just your regular H sounding letter though.
Put all those letters together and what do you get? Chanukah. End of story.
Here’s a list of annoying spellings I found on the web:
Chanuka
Chanukkah
Channukah
Hanukah
Hannukah
Hanukkah
Hanuka
Hanukka
Hanaka
Haneka
Hanika
Khanukkah
All of those are wrong for one reason or another. I’ll let you figure it out.
A little note on vowels since I mentioned them above. They’re rarely ever written out except for a few cases. Children’s books, prayer books, and the Torah. There might be a few other special cases too, but mostly you won’t ever see a vowel (which aren’t actually letters in the Hebrew alphabet anyway.)
One Response to “Happy Chanukah”
December 10th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
I feel enlightened about the festival of lights!