Patach
Pataḥ is a Hebrew niqqud vowel sign represented by a horizontal line underneath a letter. In modern Hebrew, it indicates the phoneme which is close to the "" sound in the English word far and is transliterated as an a.
In Modern Hebrew, a ' makes the same sound as a qamatz, as does the . The reduced niqqud exist for ', ', and ' which contain a next to it.
In Yiddish orthography, a pataḥ has two uses. The combination of pasekh with the letter aleph, rtl=yes, is used to represent the vowel ; the combination of pasekh with a digraph consisting of two yods, rtl=yes, is used to represent the diphthong .
Etymology
The pataḥ name comes from the verb פָּתַח 'to open', because the vowel's pronunciation, the "" sound, requires the mouth to be opened wide.Pronunciation
The following table contains the pronunciation and transliteration of the different s in reconstructed historical forms and dialects using the International Phonetic Alphabet.The letters Bet and Het used in this table are only for demonstration, any letter can be used.
A ' on a letter,, or at the end of a word is sounded before the letter, and not after. Thus, נֹחַ is pronounced in Modern Hebrew and or in Biblical Hebrew. This only occurs at the ends of words, only with pataḥ and only with these three letters. This is sometimes called a ', or "stolen" , since the sound "steals" an imaginary epenthetic consonant to make the extra syllable.