Segol (modern he, סֶגּוֹל, ; formerly , ''səḡôl'') is a
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
niqqud
In Hebrew orthography, niqqud or nikud ( or ) is a system of diacritical signs used to represent vowels or distinguish between alternative pronunciations of letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Several such diacritical systems were developed in the ...
vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (l ...
sign that is represented by three dots forming an upside down
equilateral triangle "ֶ ". As such, it resembles an upside down
therefore sign (a
because sign) underneath a letter. In
modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew ( he, עברית חדשה, ''ʿivrít ḥadašá ', , '' lit.'' "Modern Hebrew" or "New Hebrew"), also known as Israeli Hebrew or Israeli, and generally referred to by speakers simply as Hebrew ( ), is the standard form of the He ...
, it indicates the
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
which is similar to "
e" in the English word sound in ''sell'' and is
transliterated
Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus ''trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or ...
as an ''e''.
In
Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew ( he, עברית חדשה, ''ʿivrít ḥadašá ', , '' lit.'' "Modern Hebrew" or "New Hebrew"), also known as Israeli Hebrew or Israeli, and generally referred to by speakers simply as Hebrew ( ), is the standard form of the He ...
, segol makes the same sound as
tzere, as does the Hataf Segol ( he, חֲטַף סֶגּוֹל , "Reduced Segol"). The reduced (or ''ħataf'') niqqud exist for segol,
patah, and
kamatz which contain a
shva next to it.
Pronunciation
The following table contains the
pronunciation and
transliteration
Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus ''trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or ...
of the different segols in reconstructed historical forms and
dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety of a language that ...
s using the
International Phonetic Alphabet. The transcription in IPA is above and the transliteration is below.
The letters
Bet "ב" and
Het "ח" used in this table are only for demonstration. Any letter can be used.
In addition, a letter with a segol or tzere with a succeeding
yod often makes the "ei" (also spelled "ey") sound such as in they or tape.
Vowel length comparison
By adding two vertical dots (''shva''), the vowel can be made very short. However, the vowels lengths are not manifested in Modern Hebrew.
Unicode encoding
{{Hebrew language
Niqqud