It is actually embarrassing to say khamas

And you should feel a bit embarrassed about it.

Come on, that’s funny.

The Hebrew language has four guttural letters. They are:

• א Aleph, pronounced either as a silent letter or, more usually, a guttural stop.

• ע 'Ayin, a voiced pharyngeal fricative

• ה Heh, a voiceless glottal fricative, like the English letter h.

• ח, Heth, a voiceless pharyngeal fricative - henceforth /ħ/ - like an h but raspier

Except that’s not true, at least it’s not true if the word ‘Hebrew’ refers to the language of the State of Israel. If so, it has one guttural letter. To be honest, that’s cheating because most languages do. Say the words apple a few times. Unless you are Spanish or something you said it with a glottal stop. As to the rest, Israeli is all balls no strikes. Ayin is pronounced as glottal stop no different from aleph by essentially everyone, and large swathes of society will habitually use one letter in place of the other in writing. While many older Israelis do know how to say heh, it has whittled down with each generation to nothing. One of the first things you learn as an English teacher is that you should definitely not say that the letter h is pronounced like a ה, because this will just lead to confusion about whether h is actually a vowel. Then, of course, we have the infamous heth, or rather the KHet.

The story of the letter ח is as follows:

• The letter was pronounced universally by all Jews as /ħ/. However, under the influence of Greek, this tended to degrade to /h/. Rabbinic Judaism protested this development and barred those incapable of correct pronunciation from leading prayer services and similar.

• Ashkenazi Jews started pronouncing ח as an /x/ like the German ch sometimes in the Middle Ages. This was obviously facilitated by the prominence of /x/ in German, but I think maybe it was also motivated by a desire to avoid the prohibition on pronouncing ח as /h/ leading to over-correction, a phenomenon common generally among Jews who adopted the Masoretic pronunciation tradition.

• The letter כ, which is an aspirated /k/, is spirantized when it appears after a vowel. Among Ashkenazim, this was realised as a /x/, which means that the letters weak-כ and ח became the same phoneme, despite the totally different morphological rules in normative Hebrew (Masoretic) morphology that apply to them. Among non-Ashkenazim, weak כ was realised as a /χ̟/, which is slightly further back on the tongue. Apparently, this is the historically accurate realisation, even though /x/ is closer in the mouth to k.

• The revivers of Hebrew all agreed that ח should be pronounced as a ħ, but were unable to impress this on the children of the Yishuv who inherited Yiddish phonology from their parents. Thus, children grew up learning that ח and כ are the same, just like back in Belarus, but with a bit of a twist. Their teachers managed to shift the prevalent pronunciation of this Siamese-twin letter from /x/ to /χ̟/, thus giving it a little bit of Eastern flavour.

• Though MENA Jews arrived saying /ħ/, both in their native Arabic and liturgical Hebrew, they lost it in one or two generations though Israeli schooling.

The result is that Israeli has a lot of /χ̟/ in it. Other languages have /χ̟/, too, but no language has two letters that say it. Further, Israelis tend to exaggerate the /χ̟/ in an unusual way, especially in public speaking. This might be a legacy of the artificial labours early speakers had to perform to adopt it, or perhaps just simply the way that it doesn’t really shtim very well with Israeli phonology overall, leading to hyper-articulation. Another factor is that the Masoretic vocalisation system, adopted in the manner of a cargo-cult by the maskilim and then the Zionists, contains multiple orthoepic devices designed to ensure proper articulation of guttural letters, which, when you substitute in an /χ̟/, results in excessive emphasis. Regardless, the result is that Israeli is quite an ugly language by any normal standards, with the characteristic and famous phenomenon of ‘spit talk’.¹ One way this is annoying is that, if you are standing too close to an Israeli and he is agitated or exuberant, you will probably get spit in your face, which is gross. But even if you don’t, it just sounds bad and gives you a headache. The other result is that Arabs take the piss out of us because we say Khamas and it makes us sound like retards.

Now, there are two Zionist defences from this charge. The first is gay and involves such observations as ‘languages change bro’, ‘there’s no such thing as a correct language bro’ and the like. This is the thing about Zionists, especially the ones to the Right. They love to talk about how Israel is reviving an ancient civilization, that they are transcending the emptiness of modernity, and it’s all great when you stick to the generalities. But if you ever push them on anything specific about their project, suddenly we’re back to absolute gutter liberalism: ‘language is just what people speak, bro, there’s no right and wrong’. Kill yourself.

The more sophisticated apologetic for the kh goes like this:

The Hebrew Ḥet is often mockingly used as proof of Israeli Hebrew’s allegedly “European” nature. Indeed, in Israeli Hebrew it is most often pronounced as an uvular fricative /ḫ/ hence Arabic words such as ḥabībī become khabībī. This isn’t universally the case, especially among speakers of Hebrew that came from the Arab world. The pronunciation of Ḥet as /ḫ/ isn’t etymologically wrong either, as it was originally pronounced both as a pharyngeal fricative /ḥ/ and /ḫ/ in Classical Hebrew. During the period of Aramaic influence over Hebrew this was levelled to /ḥ/, and later on to /ḫ/. This last change ironically restored etymological consistency for many words, such as חמש ḫaméš “five” from Proto-Semitic *ḫamšum or ירח yaʁéᵃḫ “moon” from PS *warḫum, the toponym “Jericho” is derived from that same word yet in Arabic it is called ˀArīḥā which is etymologically incorrect due to the Aramaic levelling of /ḫ/ to /ḥ/ mentioned earlier (the word تاريخ tārīḫ “date; history” in Arabic is derived from that same root for “moon” and therefore preserves the /ḫ/).

For those who find linguistics tough, the TLDR here is ‘I am cleverer than you’, and he is cleverer than me, but I am more disagreeable. I rate this claim ‘mostly false’ for reasons I will explain in the footnote right here →², but, even if it was true, what does it change? The fact is that if you say khamas, you sound like a retard, and if you say KHamas while spitting like an Israeli on TV you sound like a double retard. The reason you sound like a retard is that Hebrew was deformed in an alien language environment, and then Zionists failed to fix it, and the language that was born was deformed.

Because Zionism is disgusting and anti-Zionism is disgusting, the online debate is between whether Israeli is really Hebrew, or whether it is actually re-lexicalised Yiddish or some nonsense. Imagine an orange. It is bitter; it is mouldy; it has lichen on it; there are flies. The owner feels embarrassed about this orange; perhaps he should throw it away instead of keeping it in the fruit bowl. But then some absolute imbecile clown comes along and says, ‘this isn’t an orange at all, it’s an apple’. Now you can debate whether it’s an orange for the next gorillian years, and you can win! So it is with Israeli. As long as there are enough dinguses willing to go to bat for the claim that it’s not Hebrew at all, but white supremacist settler colonialism reified as words, you don’t have to think about whether it’s any good.

If you take a step back, there’s an obvious word for a language like Israeli that has lost over a third of its phonology, that has been relexicalized in a haphazard fashion with tens of thousands of words from other languages, and which is developing new grammatical structures unknown to the language before: a creole. I’m not the first to point this out, but most linguists reject it for technical reasons. A creole has to evolve out of a pidgin, and Israeli didn’t. However, that is based on the assumption that linguistics is both value-neutral as a science (fair enough) and cannot inform value judgments (completely baseless inference). A creole has to be judged on purely formal criteria, and since a creole doesn’t differ generically from any other language, it can only be assigned as such based on its historical genesis. Since Israeli’s historical genesis is sui generis, it can’t be assigned as anything. Simples! But we neither have to be liberals, nor accept arbitrary and unprincipled invocations of liberalism by Zionists either. Sure, you can explain, each one on its own, why it’s totally part of normal language development for Israeli not to have a ט and not to have a ק and not to have a ח and not to have a ה and not to have an ע and not to have a ג or a ת or a ד in the weak state, and to assimilate ָ to ַ and ֵ to ֶ , and to lose gemination entirely, and whatever else I forgot. But if you put it all together, that’s a creole bro.

Why am I agitated? Well, it’s my thing, but also, I’m annoyed because word on the street is that I’m actually a Zionist, so I thought I needed to clear some things up.

Zionism is dumb and it sucks and I hate it and it’s dumb