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No-one else is going to question the use of "khamas"? Really?
Hamas is 5 letters long, it's not like it would have been difficult to get the spelling right.
It's apparently a play on words. "Khamas" in Hebrew means "violence".
You mean chamas?
That's the play on words
I thought it was to visually add an accent.
I'm guessing it was intentional. This is the first time I've seen it called "khamas," but what I understand from looking it up is that it's how the word is commonly written/pronounced in english in Israel. (If I'm wrong, please correct me!)
I've never once heard anyone, Jewish, Israeli, or otherwise, pronounce Hamas with a k.
Every single interview with any israeli spokesperson calls them Khamas. This is the norm.
Fair enough. And I should be clear, I didn't find a good source for this explanation, all that came up that was related was a few forum threads. And now that I'm looking at it again, there's a good variety of completely different answers out there. So I really don't know what to believe here.
I may just not be searching well; if anybody does have reliable info about this I'd be happy to hear it :)
In Arabic it's not an H sound it's this letter "ح". When words that use this letter in Arabic get adopted into Hebrew they are usually replaced with a "خ". In English "خ" is expressed as "kh" .
"ح": 'Ha | "خ": 'Kha | "ه": Ha
It's the standard transcription of the Arabic sound, which is closest (in fact, pretty much identical) to the Hebrew sound which is typically used to pronounce the first consonant in Hamas. Blame the bad Arabic-language education is Israel for not pronouncing it correctly...
This is, as far as I know, not a word in Arabic, and non-standard transcription for Hebrew — the standard would be "Ḥamas" or "H̲amas" (using "ch" is common but non-standard as well).
Have you ever seen anyone, anyone, spell it "Khanuka"?
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They’re mocking that Israelis can’t pronounce Hamas properly. The first letter is ح which has no equivalent in English but comes from the throat whereas Israelis pronounce Hamas and Hommos with a خ which is pronounced like the Scottish Loch.
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Israelis can just say "Hamas" like everyone else. For some reason they just decide not to.
That would be chamas, not khamas.