Issues like this are a little bit difficult to discuss in forums, because their very deliberations make it look so formal and confrontational, hence flame wars. So I wanna be clear that all this meant to be coffee chat style, not bickering.
I teach both English and history, and have been much struck professionally by examinations of the interesting nature of linguistics. There are so many avenues to pursue. The one in question here is both social and phonetic. Phonetically, the major problem is the proper rendering into one language (in this case, English) sounds that the other language has but the second does not. The sound of the Hebrew phoneme ‘CHET’ does not translate. Hence, it is either ignored or overdone. Socially, this leads to (often acrimonious) debate over spelling in the new language.
This IS actually a bigger problem than it appears. It can lead to a lot of low level ignorance, and clumsy attempts at correction. For example, the incorrect rendering from Mandarin to English of “Mao Tse Tung.” Recently, scholars had to fight quite an uphill battle to get the general public to accept the new and more faithful spelling of “Mao Zedeong.” An interesting side note here is the property of classical Chinese dialects to alter place name pronunciations in the aftermath of various political and cultural changes. A colleague of mine who teaches Chinese once explained at length to me that the capitol city of Beijing WAS actually pronounced Peking for some hundreds of years, but internal change (reflected in aspects of Chinese culture and linguistics that I cannot hope to understand, let alone explain here) caused the name to be changed to the now more commonly known Beijing. Cool, huh? Further, consider the near total lack of agreement on how to spell Libyan dictator ‘Moammar Khadafy’ (THAT spelling is how Microsoft WORD thinks it is spelled).
Back to the ‘Chanukah’ debate, with all of its interesting little aspects. Official organizations (the MLA, APA, etc.) that have no authority but academic standing and the need to establish SOME kind of standard will hand down rulings on the spelling of such words. Councils of linguistic professors will sit in conclave and hope to find choices that (in their minds) make the most sense. The trap here is that the rest of us are often suckered into accepting that these decisions are somehow ironclad RULES and not mere conventions of considered convenience. The throat-clearing sound of the Hebrew ‘CHET’ is sometimes rendered into English by use of the ‘H’ with a dot over it, or more commonly by using the ‘CH’ option. Both of these options sort of fail, in that nobody really knows what the dotted-H means, and the ‘CH’ can lead to mispronunciations as in the words choice, choose, and cherry.
Well, in this specific case, the various authorities have correctly noted that the closest possible Hebrew-to-English transliteration is to use the ‘CH’ spelling. The word in Hebrew characters does not begin with the Hebrew ‘HAY’ (our English H) symbol, but rather with ‘CHET’. The general lessons to be taken away from this, as I teach it to MY students, are:
1 – Don’t put absolute trust in so-called authorities, and recognize ground for legitimate disagreement.
2 – Small things can lead to big problems.
3 – The inherently limited and flawed nature of written communication makes certain problems inevitable. That is why mastering the nuances of grammar, punctuation, and mechanics is actually so vitally important. In fact, this very mini-essay that I have written here includes an hour’s worth of editing to make sure that every symbol and word choice conveyed exactly what I wanted it to (particularly in my selection of modifying adverbs and adjectives), and there will doubtless still be people whose internal connotations will take away that which is different from the implied denotations. Plus, WORD keeps telling me not to use the Passive Voice. Stupid Microsoft.
English is fun, ain’t it?
