Question from a reader:
Rabbi, I have a question that may be insignificant: why do you use the “Q” instead of “K” to translate the Hebrew into English, for example, when you write “Bet haMiqdash”? I have seen that you also write “Qabbala “instead of” Kabbala “, why is that?
Dear friend, the Hebrew language is very different from English or Spanish. And not all consonants in Hebrew have their perfect equivalence in English. If we review the vocabulary we would see that, for example, the letter ח HET and especially the ע AYIN, are impossible to transliterate (or translate, as you say). So when transliterating from Hebrew into English, there is no right or wrong. We rather adopt certain conventionalism. I, for example, have chosen to write the letter צ, which has no equivalent in non-Semitic languages, as “ts” instead of “tz”, because this is how the first Jews who wrote Tora books in Castilian (16th Century ) or in English (17th century) wrote this letter. Again, this does not mean that this is the only way to write this letter.
Regarding the Hebrew letter ק by Q, it is much easier to explain.
If you compare the two vocabularies, Hebrew and English, you would immediately see that there is a fairly precise equivalence in the order of the two vocabularies.
Very briefly
The letter א is a silent letter, and is equivalent to the mute “H”, in modern Spanish, but the ordinal equivalent would be the letter A.
The letter ב obviously is B.
The letter ג equals C. There are some words that still preserve this equivalence ג = C. As גמל, “Gamal”, “camel”.
Then, the Hebrew letter ד, is obviously the D.
Up to here, as you can see, we have the almost perfect equivalent of ABCD.
Then it gets more complicated, but only a little.
In Hebrew, the vowels are not part of the alphabet, as they are in English. That’s why the letter ה becomes E.
The Hebrew letter ו, a “v”, is very close to F (labio-dental).
The ז is close to a G, when it is followed by an “e” or “i” for example, “genes” or “page”.
The letter ח in Israel often is expressed with H, as in “Haifa” or “Hadera”. Some people write CH or H with a dot underneath.
The letter ט, has no equivalent in the English alphabet. I really do not know why ….
The letter י is the “I”.
The Hebrew letter כ is the “K”.
ל letters, מ, נ, are L, M, N.
The ס has no clear equivalent in the English ABC. It is possible, but I’m not sure, that letters which repeat themselves (there are two “T” and three “S” in Hebrew) are expressed in the English alphabet only once …
The letter ע, becomes a vowel. Arbitrarily, the “O”. Same thing happened with the א , which became A and with the ה , that became E.
The letter פ is the “P”.
The צ has no equivalent …. (it is close to the “S”, and if so, the “S: will be transferred into English only once).
And finally we come to the letter you asked me about, the ק, which obviously equals Q, not K. That is why I prefer to write “Miqdash” rather than “Mikdash”, etc.
Finally, the next three letters, do not require much explanation: ר, ש, ת are obviously equivalent to R, S, T.
