Wow, it seems early for the Jewish holidays.

[conuly]

And yet, here we are.

I googled L’Shana Tova to make sure I was spelling it right, and I found this. That's probably helpful to some people, but it did nothing to alleviate my specific spelling-related concerns.

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Comments

[cosmolinguist]

The tone of the "blind video gamer" article is a little cripspirational, but not as bad as it could be I guess. I'm intrigued that he's playing Street Fighter V, which is also one of the video games my boyfriend plays that I can actually play a little myself. As a partially sighted person I find the graphics good and clear for a modern game (obviously styled on old ones) and it hadn't consciously occurred to me that the sound cues are really good but it makes sense now I think about it.

As for the spelling of Hebrew words, I don't think there's ever going to be a single correct one in the Latin alphabet. It depends on the language it's being spelled into, too, like how there's spellings of a word like hummus that follow either English or French (houmous) orthpgraphic and phonotactic rules in transliterating it from the Arabic.

[sabotabby]

FWIW I'm Jewish and I still never know how things are spelled.

[librarygeek]

For that link, I take L'Shana Tovah as a wish or a prayer, a benediction if you will. "For a good year!"

At this time, I'll accept anything well meant. "Save us from sickness", "Who shall perish intubated and alone!" The prayers this year are truly out of the depths of our souls. 😭✡️😷🙏💔🎼

[conuly]

I'd say this year can't possibly be worse than the preceding ones, but I've been wrong before.

[adrian_turtle]

Bite your tongue! (Meaning approximately, "avert the omen!" to the universe, and also "don't say that again!" to the speaker.)

I also take "L'shana tovah" as a wish, parallel to "L'chaim."

[brokenallbroken]

JSYK, I am 99.99% certain Gallus didn't give Cheezburger permission to repost their story re: wolfdog. Here's the original Tumblr post.

[conuly]

Thanks, I'll fix the link.

[griffen]

It can be spelled multiple ways:

Shana Tova
Shanah Tovah
Shana Tovah
Shanah Tova

And any of them can be preceded with L', followed by "tikateivu," or followed by "umetuka(h)".

The reason? It's transliteration, not translation. It's a sounding-out of the Hebrew letters and sounds.

Just like Hanukkah (Chanuka, Chanukah, Hanuka).

So try not to worry too much about how to spell it. :) The thought is there, and that's what counts.

[pauamma]

Fancy meeting you here. I was about to mention the spelling you used, but I guess it's moot (US sense) now.

[dorchadas]

I definitely don't agree with the naysayers in that article. Saying that it's wrong because it sounds odd in English is...very weird for a phrase from another language. And as it mentions, Israelis also say l'shanah tovah so they can hardly be wrong (unless the Akademya disagrees, I guess).

Plus the traditional expression to a pregnant woman is b'shaa tovah ("at a good hour"), and I've never heard anyone saying we should drop the b'.