transliteration question

[cellio]

This is for the Hebrew-speakers out there.

I'm transliterating some Hebrew choral music for people who (mostly) do not speak the language. I'm fairly pedantic about pronunciation, though, so I don't want to overload symbols that can be confusing. Been there; done that.

The question is the shva. I have seen it transliterated as "e" (same as segol, or is it tzere?), which isn't quite the same sound. I've seen it transliterated as an apostrophe, but apostrophes are also used to indicate glottal stops, and I think I probably shouldn't use it for that reason. I am considering using a colon, which isn't overloaded with anything and has the advantage of resembling the Hebrew nikud (for the people in the choir who can take advantage of that knowledge). I am limited to the standard ASCII character set, and I don't want the singers to struggle with the text.

We're doing Sephardi pronunciation. I'm using "ch" for both chet and chaf because near as I can tell there really is no difference between them. I'm using "ei" for whichever of tzere or segol has the long sound (I don't know all the vowel names). I don't distinguish between tet and taf, or sin and samech.

Opinions? Other suggestions?

Comments

[marnen.livejournal.com]

Interesting issue. I haven't set Hebrew texts to music in a long time, and when I did, I used an ad hoc transliteration scheme that I probably wouldn't recommend now (it almost *has* to be transliterated -- right-to-left lyrics under left-to-right notes just aren't practical!).

By Sephardi pronunciation, I assume you mean modern Israeli, more or less, in which case there are the following sound-alike consonants:

kaf/kof	k
tet/tav	t
chet/chaf	ch (actually, I'd tend to do kh or x)
vet/vav	v
sin/samech	s
alef/ayin	see below

There are also six vowels, not counting doubled vowels and diphthongs: a, e, i, o, u, and the dreaded shva. (And to complicate matters, apparently the shva symbol is sometimes pronounced e rather than shva!) Haiim Rosén, in his A Textbook of Israeli Hebrew, just omits the shva sound in his transliterations (I guess he doesn't really consider it a phoneme), but he makes sure to indicate the circumstances under which it's pronounced. When he needs to indicate the sound, he uses a superscript e (or a, depending on the actual sound). This frees up the apostrophe for alef and ayin.

It's a good scheme for a language textbook, but not one I'd recommend for a singable transliteration. I'd indicate the shva everywhere, either by a superscript vowel or by a schwa symbol from an IPA font. Or you could do what they do in Indonesian: "é" = segol or tsere (which are pronounced the same in Israeli speech), "e" = shva.

Alternatively, since glottal stops tend to be barely pronounced in Hebrew, you could use the apostrophe for the shva, and just not transliterate alef and ayin. Perhaps let the singers know that initial vowels are preceded by a glottal stop as in German.

Hope this helps!
--Marnen/Ze'ev

[marnen.livejournal.com]

Another idea just came to me. I don't much like it, but I thought I'd pass it on. How about "j" for yod and "y" for shva?

[cellio]

Thanks for all the feedback!

Yes, I should have specified -- I'm talking about how to notate the cases where the shva is pronounced. Transliteration is a set of instructions for pronunciation, after all. :-)

I was taught that segol and tzere are not pronounced the same -- one is soft, sort of an "eh", and the other is long, like the "e" in "they". (So the name is MoshEH, not MoshEY, for example.)

If I could figure out how to get a shva symbol, I'd do that. I'll see if I can do superscripts or subscripts.

(By the way, I'm using "ch" rather than "kh" because the choir members are already used to that sound, with "ch", from German. I'm also predisposed to it because it's the first representation I learned for that sound, but mostly it's a matter of building on what's already familiar to them.)

More after Shabbat.