See Sephiroth. This is a transliteration—the way a word sounds in one language spelled out in another—of a Hebrew term. In the most common transliteration, the “th” is pronounced with a hard “t” followed by a short breath, not like the “th” in the English word “the” (phonetically, the “th” in “the” is called a “fricative”). This is not clear in the archaic “Sephiroth” spelling, leading many people, untrained in Hebrew, to end the word with the fricative, so it sounds (incorrectly) like "seh-fear-oath." The spelling “Sephiroht” makes the correct pronunciation, “seh-fear-oat,” more obvious.
Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Tamara L. Siuda, PhD, author of the new Weather Magic.
Members of the alphabet community (from acronyms representing different sexualities and gender identities in the LGBTQIA+ community) often have...