Qamatz Qaṭan vs. Qamatz Gadol The Hebrew of the late centuries BCE and early centuries of the
Common Era had a system with five
phonemic long vowels and five short vowels . In the later dialects of the 1st millennium CE, phonemic vowel length disappeared, and instead was automatically determined by the context, with vowels pronounced long in
open syllables and short in closed ones. However, the previous vowel phonemes merged in various ways that differed from dialect to dialect: • In
Tiberian Hebrew, which underlies
the written system of vowels, short became (indicated by '
); long became (indicated by '); while and both merged into an in-between sound (similar to the vowel in English "caught" without the
cot-caught merger), which was indicated by qamatz. • In the
Babylonian vocalization, however, short and long variants simply merged, with and becoming [a], while and became [o]; and this system underlies the pronunciation of
Modern Hebrew. The result is that in Modern Hebrew, the vowel written with qamatz might be pronounced as either [a] or [o], depending on historical origin. It is often said that the two sounds can be distinguished by context: • The qamatz sound of , known as '''''' (, , "little qamatz") occurs in a "closed syllable", i.e. one which ends in a consonant marked with a
shwa nakh (zero vowel) or with a Dagesh#Dagesh Ḥazak| (which indicates that the consonant was pronounced
geminated, i.e. doubled); • The qamatz sound of , known as '''''' ( , "big qamatz") occurs in an "open syllable", i.e. any other circumstance: one which ends in a consonant followed by a normal vowel, a consonant at the end of a word and with no vowel marking, or a consonant marked with a
shwa na (originally pronounced ). Unfortunately, the two varieties of shwa are written identically, and pronounced identically in Modern Hebrew; as a result, there is no reliable way to distinguish the two varieties of qamatz when followed by a vowel marked with a shwa. (In some cases, Biblical texts are marked with a
metheg or other
cantillation mark that helps to indicate which pronunciation is intended, but this usage is not consistent, and in any case such marks are absent in non-Biblical texts.) It should also be noted that there are examples of qamatz qaṭan appearing in open syllables, such as in the plural of wikt:שורש| (, "root"), wikt:שורש| (). An example of the
qamatz qatan is the Modern Hebrew word (, "program"). According to the standard
Hebrew spelling rules as published by the
Academy of the Hebrew Language, words which have a qamatz qatan in their base form must be written without a
vav, hence the standard vowel-less spelling of is . In practice, however, Modern Hebrew words containing a qamatz qatan do add a
vav to indicate the pronunciation; hence the nonstandard (also termed "excessive") spelling is common in newspapers and is even used in several dictionaries, for example
Rav Milim. Words which in their base form have a holam| that changes to in declension retain the
vav in vowel-less spelling: the noun (, "freedom") is spelled in vowel-less texts; the adjective (, "free") is spelled in vowel-less text, despite the use of qamatz qatan, both according to the standard spelling and in common practice. Some books print the differently, although the way in which they do is not consistent. For example, in siddur
Rinat Yisrael the vertical line of qamatz qatan is longer. In
Siddur Sim Shalom, the horizontal line is separated from the bottom. In a book of
Psalms used by some
Breslov hassidim the qamatz qatan is bolder. In the popular niqqud textbook
Niqqud halakha le-maase by
Nisan Netser, the qamatz qatan is printed as an encircled qamatz for didactic purposes.
Unicode defines the code point , although its usage is not required.
Ḥaṭaf Qamatz '''''' (, ) is a "reduced qamatz". Like qamatz qatan, it is pronounced , but the rationale for its usage is different: it replaces the
shva on letters which require a shva according to the grammar, but where the traditional pronunciation is . This mostly happens with gutturals, for example in (, "pines", the plural form of , ), but occasionally also on other letters, for example (, "roots", another plural of ); and (, "birds", the plural of (). ==Pronunciation and transliteration==