Entering the Jewish synagogue, one word in particular might seem familiar: Amen. In the Hebrew world of the shul, it can be really exciting to hear a word you already know! You might already know Shabbat, shalom, and a few other words, but Amen is downright familiar to the average American.
But don’t go around saying “A-men” because that’ll peg you as a n00b immediately. Judaism has a different pronunciation of Amen than you are probably used to.
Say it with me: “Ah-main” (spelled for the average American English speaker). You may see it written in transliteration as Amein, but don’t confuse that with the German pronunciation of “mein.” And don’t be misled by the “How to Pronounce Amen” video on YouTube. Often, I find their videos useful in Jewish contexts, but not for this word.
This one easy tweak to your vocabulary can make you fit in a lot faster! And you won’t feel like an idiot by learning it the hard way. Of course, most people wouldn’t be as hard on you as you will be on yourself. Small changes, big embarrassment feelings avoided.
I love when old pray books ohymen, using the yiddish pronunciation. When I use it, it always makes people around me smile
Personally, I read the male' vowels as longer versions of themselves, and not as a diphthong (although it seems to me like the former applies to some dialects, while the latter applies to others)…
I don't know how to easily enter symbols that would let me distinguish between segol and tzere in transliteration, but I feel like "amein" would lead many to pronounce the tzere as [in International Phonetic Alphabet] /ej/ when tzere male is (again, the phonology that I taught myself with, along with the phonology of Israeli Hebrew) /e:/ … but it definitely seems to be more like /amejn/ in Ashkenazi Hebrew.
Ah, I feel really stupid after I ramble about vowels :D… .–.
Many English-speaking folk pronounce the word quite differently, depending upon where their grandfathers came from.
It could be, as you say, "Ah-main"; But just as frequent, is "oo-mine",
and much less frequently you'll also hear "oo-main".
The word has Aleph in Hebrew
Aleph is Ah
Is this to mean:
That Amein should be pronounced the same as if I have just arrived to my destination "AH Maine !!"
YES.
After going to Israel multiple times, i can see other than my kinda way too reformed temple still taught us AH-MAIN for hebrew pronunciated.
My Temple had a torah with hebrew and latin phonetic spellings cause we did all prayer in hebrew and most the Temple didn't know how to read real Hebrew. Also go to the Kotel aka Western Wall and Orthodox pray there like sooooo much so you'll hear it correctly a lot. More than enough times to verify how people who speak in hebrew say "AMEN"
And "Eh" as in the hebrew word for fire or "ESH in american spelling but the E is really an א. I don't know the exact spelling but i imagine אש is pretty close, but my hebrew school was strictly for bar mitzvahs. Super reformed so zero vocabulary .
You had to voluntarily to hebrew high school to learn truly how to speak fluently which all my other friends could speak hebrew by q 3 yrs old. Fluent too.
They were conservative temples where they cared to teach hebrew for real.
MY ENTIRE POINT, THIS IS WHY SOOOO MANY REFORMED NON NATIVE ISRAELI SPEAKERS MISTRANSLATED ALL THE TIME.
I KNOW FOR A FACT SOME KIDS AT MY TEMPMPLE WEREN'T TAUGHT PROPER HEBREW PRONUNCIATION BECAUSE THE TEACHERS HARDLY KNEW HEBREW THEMSELVES.