Aramaic Letters: Chet

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The next letter of the Aramaic Alphabet is called Chet, where the h sound is half way between ‘h’ (as in house or Hannah) and ‘ch’ (as in the Scottish loch or the German Bach). This sound does not exist in English; it is produced by saying h from the back of the throat and closing the throat, slightly choking the sound. The best way for an English speaker to pronounce the sound is to imagine that you are breathing on your hands to warm them up on a cold winter day, but producing the sound further back in the throat.

The Aramaic letter Chet corresponds to the Hebrew letter Chet in the Hebrew Alphabet. The letters in the Aramaic Alphabet are almost identical to those in Hebrew, but have slightly different names and sometimes slightly different sounds.

  Aramaic audio: Listen to the sound of Chet.

 
With many Hebrew and Aramaic speakers across the Middle East today, the letter Chet has lost its original sound and tends to be pronounced as ch as in the words loch or Bach, because many Aramaic speakers are unable to articulate the correct h sound. Arabic speakers and many Jews from Arab countries are able to make the correct sound. In particular, Yemenite Jews are recognized as speaking ‘correct’ or authentic sound, with the original pronunciation of all the letters intact after all these years.

Here is what the Aramaic letter Chet looks like:

Here is how to write Chet:



 
Chet is a special letter, called a guttural. This means that it is pronounced from the throat, and because of this it has a number of special properties, just like the other Aramaic gutturals. You will learn more about the gutturals in a future lesson, but for now note the following points:

Chet has the Gematria (numerical value) of 8.

Practise writing Chet in the grid lines below:









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