A Simplified System of Hebrew-English and Aramaic-English Transliteration

A system of transliteration of Hebrew and Aramaic into English that would be suitable for general use and at the same time capable of serving the ordinary requirements of scholars without having recourse to a host of quaint and curious symbols of phoneticians, national or international, has long been a desideratum. In recent years the need for greater economy in printing philological papers has emphasized the desideratum to the point where it has ceased to be merely a matter of scholarly taste and is felt to be a necessity. The system of transliteration here proposed is offered in the hope that it may meet this twofold need. Since the Hebrew consonants and vowel signs are employed in Aramaic, we shall restrict ourselves in the following discussion to Hebrew, with the understanding that what holds for Hebrew applies to all corresponding phenomena in Aramaic. In evaluating the proposed system it should be borne in mind that it is meant to be a Hebrew-English, not an international system.2 This will explain why the symbols bh, gh, dh, kh, ph, and th have been chosen to represent the spirants, and sh to represent one of the sibilants.3 While v might have served in place of bh, and f in place of ph, the compound symbols were thought to be preferable because of consistency