Welcome to the Renana Transliteration Guide. I have been typesetting for decades and a good part of the work that I do are Jewish books in English. More often than not, the books have Hebrew transliterated into English using Modern Israeli pronunciation, however, the author doesn’t necessarily have good command of Hebrew. Mistakes like Tzlafchad, mikva and roshei yeshiva are excellent examples.
I expect that it will take many years to make this guide comprehensive, and hopefully others will help volunteer to make this work.
The general principles that I have followed are as follows: I am not aiming to create a true transliteration guide where each letter of the Hebrew word is represented, but rather a way of writing the word in English such that the reader will say it more or less correctly.
I have chosen to use “ch” for both the ח and the כ in most cases. A notable exception is the Hebrew name Ham. In general if a word ends with “a”, I have omitted the h even if in the Hebrew there is a ה. Another notable exception would be Torah where the word is an English word, but also Sarah where we are used to seeing the name with an “h”. An “h” is added to words which end with an “e” so that they pronounced correctly, but there are exceptions like Moshe.
Also included is the Hebrew both with nikud and without. This also means it’s easier to search. I have included breaks using the tilde ~. One tilde being the ideal break, three, the least ideal. This can be copied and pasted into corrections for InDesign, and then InDesign will hyphenate accordingly. The stress on the syllable is indicated with boldface.
If the word has a letter in curly braces such as {T} this means that this is the style of the particular publishing house, this case Targum. If you wish to add your publishing style, then please be in touch.
Common usages spellings are included even if they are quite wrong like mikva and parsha along with common academic styles like No’aḥ.
I hope you find this useful and if you have any comments please don’t hesitate to be in touch.