A little about Channukah. No I’m not Jewish.
According to Google, the standard spelling of the holiday in standard Hebrew Square is:
חנוכה (read RtL)
Which would transliterate to:
ḩnnḩh (read LtR)
or more correctly
ḩ(1) n(1) n(2) ḩ(2) h
The numbers in parentheses indicate different Hebrew characters that stand for the same sound (like C and K or C and S can in English).
One standard rule of transliteration is avoid using International Phonetic Alphabetic (IPA) characters, and use common characters. THis causes issue when phonemes (mouth sounds) aren’t used in a language. In this case, many choose to use “ch” in place of “ḩ” because of the German name “Bach” is familiar with enough English speakers to make the association. However, that phoneme placed at the front of a word is counter-intuitive to English. The correct choice should be “q” (or “kh”) – but neither are common enough for public use. The difference would then show as
chnnchh
or
qnnqh
You can clearly see the legibility difference – but English speakers aren’t used to seeing “q” without a “u” following it.
Additionally, double letters are used in many languages for different reasons. Sometimes they are hold-overs from ancient pronunciations, sometimes they are scribal inflections meant to enforce the phoneme by the reader (e.g., Ancient Egyptian scribes wrote the name of the Goddess “BAS-T” as “BAS-T-T” to remind the reader that they MUST pronounce the name with the final-T because Greek linguistic influenced caused the population to start to slur or omit the final-T, which did not exist in Greek. Later transliterators mistakenly renamed her “Bastet”.) In this example, the double Ns are unnecessary. So:
chnchh
As for vowel additions, that is mostly colloquial. Placement becomes an issue, because Hebrew Square is Alphabetic and not Syllabic. In Syllabic scripts, every consonant may be followed by a vowel. (Katakana in Japenese is like this – with an odd cultural acceptance that the “-u” ending sound may be voiceless and therefore omitted entirely.) The next issue is which vowels are placed where? Traditionally, the letter “a” stands for generic vowels. This is not to be confused with the Hebrew letter א which not a vowel but actually a glottal-stop consonant that is ALWAYS followed by a vowel-sound. Sometimes it’s “a” and sometimes it’s “e”. So the generic spelling might be:
chanachaha
While this looks a little weird, it is almost perfect. To the English ear, the final-H appears out of place because we don’t hear the vowel. In truth, the final vowel is voiceless and to Hebrew speakers with pronounced linguistic influence it is not even pronounced at all (i.e., dropped). Therefore, they usually drop the vowel, but keep the “h” for accuracy and tradition-sake.
chanachah
Now it’s time to make it easy for foreigners to pronounce, so let’s do away with the second “ch” and make it a “k”. That’s fine because in common speech it’s spoken so quickly that’s almost correct. The first “ch” is a different problem. English speakers want to pronounce it with the front their mouths and the tongue pressed in the middle. The actual phoneme is pronounced from the back of the mouth with the tongue pressed nearly closed (but not close) in the back of the mouth. The closest English phoneme is “k” but that’s too far from the original. So the choice is either “ch” or “h”. Hard choice. The “h” is easier for English speakers to get right, but “ch” can be used to teach people (“ch” as in “Bach”, understand?).
chanakah
Now to finish up. One weird problem is that there are dialects in English that will always screw up a foreign letter “a”. We’re the only ones who pronounce “a” as in “hay” or “way”. Everyone else pronounces it “a” as in “father” or “wash”. The rules of English reflect this, so to use the rules of English against the reader, we’ll reapply the second “n” and replace the second “a” with a “u” to make it harder for them to say “Hay-nah-kay”. Oh, and it’s a religious festival, so it get’s capitalized (There is no majuscule script in Hebrew). So:
Channukah
There you go.
