July 6, 2014 How to pronounce “Hasidic”
I just came across this line in an email correspondence: “Life of an Hassidic woman.”
Because of the an before the word Hassidic, we think that Hassidic is pronounced with a silent H, as if it was acidic. Our sentence reads “life of an Acidic woman.” No, that is not good. Grievous error. Hasidic is actually CHasidic, with a strong guttural CH in the beginning. Because the guttural CH does not exist in English, we drop the guttural letter chet – חand replace it with the H sound. Hence (not ence): Hasidic
When I googled acidic, one of the first images that came up was a graphic presentation of this terrible sin of grammar: An Acidic man would look like this:
Enough with the ilarity and umor! We now know two things: that Hasidic’s H is pronounced and Google’s spying habits on my search history are even more so.