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| Pataḥ | |
| ַ | |
| IPA | [a] or[ä] |
| Transliteration | a |
| English approximation | far |
| Same sound | qamatz |
| Example | |
| גַּם | |
| The word foralso inHebrew,gam. The first and only vowel (underGimel, the horizontal line) is a pataḥ. | |
| OtherNiqqud | |
| Shwa · Hiriq · Tzere · Segol · Pataḥ · Kamatz · Holam · Dagesh · Mappiq · Shuruk · Kubutz · Rafe · Sin/Shin Dot | |
Pataḥ (Hebrew:פַּתָּחpatákh,IPA:[paˈtaħ],Biblical Hebrew:pattā́ḥ) is aHebrewniqqudvowel sign represented by ahorizontal line⟨ אַ ⟩ underneath a letter. Inmodern Hebrew, it indicates thephoneme/a/ which is close to the "[a]" sound in the English wordfar and istransliterated as ana.
InModern Hebrew, apataḥ makes the same sound as aqamatz, as does theḥaṭaf pataḥ (Hebrew:חֲטַף פַּתַחIPA:[ħaˈtˤafpaˈtaħ], "reducedpataḥ"). The reduced (orḥaṭaf) niqqud exist forpataḥ,qamatz, andsegol which contain ashva next to it.
InYiddish orthography, apataḥ (calledpasekh in Yiddish) has two uses. The combination of pasekh with the letteraleph,אַ, is used to represent the vowel [a]; the combination of pasekh with adigraph consisting of twoyods,ײַ, is used to represent thediphthong [aj].
The following table contains thepronunciation andtransliteration of the differentpataḥs in reconstructed historical forms anddialects using theInternational Phonetic Alphabet.
The lettersBet⟨ב⟩ andHet⟨ח⟩ used in this table are only for demonstration, any letter can be used.
| Symbol | Name | Pronunciation | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Israeli | Ashkenazi | Sephardi | Yemenite | Tiberian | Reconstructed | |||
| Mishnaic | Biblical | |||||||
| בַ | Pataḥ | [a] | [ä] | [ä] | [a] | [a,aː] | [a] | [a] |
| בַא,בַה | Pataḥ male | [a] | [ä] | [ä] | [a] | [aː] | [a] | [a] |
| חֲ | Ḥaṭaf pataḥ | [a] | [ä] | [ä] | [a] | [ă] | [a] | [a] |
Apataḥ on a letterח,ע, orהּ (that is,ה with a dot (mappiq) in it) at the end of a word is soundedbefore the letter, and not after. Thus,נֹחַ (Noah; properly transliterated asNoaḥ) is pronounced/no.aχ/ in Modern Hebrew and/no.aħ/ or/no.ʔaħ/ in Biblical Hebrew. This only occurs at the ends of words, only with pataḥ and only with these three letters. This is sometimes called apataḥ gnuva, or "stolen"pataḥ (more formally, "furtivepataḥ"), since the sound "steals" an imaginaryepenthetic consonant to make the extra syllable.
By adding two vertical dots (shva) the vowel is made very short. However, these vowels lengths are not manifested in Modern Hebrew.
| Vowel comparison table | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vowel Length | IPA | Transliteration | English approximation | ||
| Long | Short | Very short | |||
| ָ | ַ | ֲ | [a] | a | spa |
| Qamatz | Pataḥ | Reducedpataḥ | |||
| Glyph | Unicode | Name |
|---|---|---|
| ַ | U+05B7 | PATAH |
| ֲ | U+05B2 | HATAF PATAH |