Aramaic Vowels: Patah/Kamets

This series of web pages provides free lessons on the Aramaic Vowels. Previous lessons looked at the Aramaic Alphabet.

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The next two Aramaic Vowels are called Patah and Kamets. Patah is pronounced with the letter Chet at the end. These two vowels are considered together because there is a very close relationship between them.

Patah is represented by a small straight horizontal line under the letter. Kamets is represented by a similar straight line, but with a small vertical line in the middle, giving a tiny T shape. These two vowels are very common and occur in the vast majority of Aramaic words.

Here is what Patah and Kamets look like with imaginary Aramaic letters:

Aramaic vowel Patah  Patah

Aramaic vowel Kamets  Kamets

Patah and Kamets are very similar Aramaic Vowels, and some Biblical Aramaic grammars try to explain the difference by saying that Patah is a short vowel and Kamets is a long vowel.

If there ever was a difference in the length of these vowels, this has now been lost. Among Hebrew and Aramaic speakers today, the sound of both these vowels is exactly the same - a medium-length a sound, like the words apple, bat or cat. Why, then, are different vowel signs used if both these Aramaic Vowels have the same sound?

The different vowels are used to indicate where the stress and emphasis in the Aramaic word lies, and to indicate whether a syllable is open or closed. (An open syllable is one that ends with a vowel, and a closed syllable is one that ends with a consonant).

A Patah is generally used in two situations:
  • when there is a closed syllable,
  • when the syllable with the Patah is stressed.
A Kamets on the other hand, is used in the opposite situations:
  • when the syllable is open,
  • when the syllable with the Kamets is not stressed.
Observing carefully whether the vowel is Patah or Kamets will help you enormously in understanding how to pronounce an Aramaic word, once you know what the other Aramaic Vowels and Aramaic letters are. Take, for example, the following Hebrew word:

Aramaic word makom  a place, occurs 84 times in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible)

This word means a place, and you will know by now that it is pronounced makom. But knowing only this does not necessarily mean that you will pronounce it exactly correct. It could be pronounced ma-Kom, with the emphasis on the Kom, or mak-Om, similar to Scottish names beginning with Mac. So which is it?

Since the first Meem has a Kamets under it, and we now know that Kamets is used for an open or unstressed syllable, it must be ma-Kom, which is the only pronunciation which leaves the ma as an open syllable.

As another example, take the Hebrew word Aramaic word haya pronounced haya, meaning it/he was, and used 345 times in the Tanakh. Since this has Kamets under the first two consonants, it means that both are open syllables. Thus, the correct pronunciation must be ha-ya, leaving both syllables open. If it were hay-a (similar to the English greeting Hiya!) then the first syllable would be closed and Patah would have been used instead.

Finally, let us look at a word where only Patah is used. In the Hebrew word Aramaic word gam meaning also (used 508 times in the Hebrew Bible), the Patah indicates that the pronunciation is gam. It is a closed syllable, and there is no other way to pronounce it.

As you learn more Aramaic grammar, you will see how both of these Aramaic Vowels are used and how the vowel changes depending on what happens to the word and what form it takes.

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