the Berasit Hebrew Dictionary

In the interest of consistency, it is our aim to ensure that each Hebrew word is interpreted as a single word with a single spelling and a single pronunciation. Only in this manner can an accurate analysis of any given word occur.

To this end we have developed a transliterative alphabet which has a one-to-one correspondence in both Hebrew and English, and is relatively readily pronounceable to an English speaker, without straying too far from the probable Hebrew pronunciation.

We use this alphabet for dictionary entries, so that they are searchable using an English keyboard. It may be helpful to think of these transliterated words as mnemonics rather than being purely translative or representational.

With this alphabet it is possible to flip back and forth between Hebrew and English with single characters, thus avoiding the problem of knowing whether or not to split up diadic characters such as “sh”, “ch”, “tz” that are commonly used in Hebrew linguistics.

For an example of the diadic problem, consider the word 'itza'. This does not uniquely map back to Hebrew, but rather can be mapped back to either

It is impossible to know which Hebrew word is referred to. We avoid this problem by mapping

We acknowledge that this choice comes with a moderate level of degeneration to the level of pronunciation usability, and consider the increase in written clarity a higher priority.