Ilustration Credit: Elad Lifshitz, Dov Abramson Studio

Pronouncing the words of the Torah is mostly just about knowing the shapes and sounds of the letters along with all of the vowels. And then there are also letters that have added dots on them, which sometimes change the sound. For instance: the letter ב (vet/bet) is pronounced “v” when it appears without a dot, but when it has a dot—like this: בּ—the sound changes to “b.”

Well, guess what? This can happen to the letter ה (heh) as well, when it comes at the end of a word. Check out some of these words that appear in our parashah and see what they all have in common:

That’s right, they all have a dot in the final heh! That little dot, when it appears in a heh, is called a מַפִּיק (mapik). It adds some breath to the letter heh, which is normally silent at the end of a word. So the words here are pronounced o-taH, laH, and shenataH, where the “H” sounds like it does in the word “hear.” It is not such an easy sound to make! Experienced Torah readers work to practice letting out that H sound as they read. It changes the meaning of the word to mean something that belongs to a female, just like in the common Hebrew word שֶׁלָּהּּּ (shelah, hers).

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