How Sounds Are Made

Your Mouth Is a Musical Instrument

Every time you speak, your body does something remarkable. Air rises from your lungs, passes through your vocal cords, enters a chamber of soft tissue — tongue, teeth, lips, palate — and somewhere in that space it is shaped into meaning. A slight shift of the tongue, a closing of the lips, a tightening of the throat, and one sound becomes another.

This lesson is about the geography of that process. We are going to walk through the mouth from front to back — lips to throat — and discover where each Hebrew consonant is born. Along the way, you will start to see something that may surprise you: the Hebrew alphabet is not arranged randomly. Its sounds follow a physical map of the human vocal tract, and understanding that map makes the whole system easier to learn.

If you have ever watched a singer warm up or a speech therapist work with a child, you have seen this principle in action. Sounds have addresses. This lesson teaches you the addresses.

The Journey from Lips to Throat

Imagine standing at the entrance of a cave and walking inward. The opening of the cave is your lips. The deepest chamber is your throat. Every Hebrew consonant is produced somewhere along this path, and linguists organize them in exactly this order — from the outermost sounds to the innermost.

Here is the map:

1. Bilabial — Both lips press together. This is the very first point of contact and produces the most visible sounds. You can see someone making a /b/ or /m/ across a noisy room. Hebrew letters produced here: בּ (Bet), מ (Mem), פּ (Pe).

2. Labiodental — The lower lip rises to touch the upper teeth. Move just slightly inward from the bilabial position and you are here. Hebrew letters produced here: ב (Vet), פ (Fe). Notice something? Vet is the soft form of Bet, and Fe is the soft form of Pe. When these begadkephat letters lose their dagesh, they literally shift their place of articulation — the lips part slightly and the lower lip finds the teeth instead. The sound moves inward.

3. Dental / Alveolar — The tongue tip touches the teeth or the bony ridge just behind them (called the alveolar ridge — run your tongue along the roof of your mouth just behind your upper front teeth, and you will feel it). This is the busiest neighborhood in the Hebrew mouth. Letters produced here include: דּ (Dalet), תּ (Tav), ט (Tet), נ (Nun), ל (Lamed), ס (Samekh), שׁ (Shin), שׂ (Sin), צ (Tsade), ז (Zayin), and ר (Resh, in its classical trilled pronunciation). The soft forms of Dalet and Tav — pronounced /ð/ and /θ/ in ancient Hebrew, like English “this” and “think” — also live here.

4. Palatal — The middle of the tongue rises toward the hard palate (the dome-shaped roof of your mouth). Only one Hebrew letter lives here: י (Yod), the gliding /j/ sound, as in “yes.” It is a quiet, gentle sound — an approximant, meaning the tongue approaches the palate without actually touching it.

5. Velar — The back of the tongue rises to meet the soft palate (the velum — the soft area behind the hard palate). Hebrew letters produced here: גּ (Gimel), כּ (Kaf), and their soft begadkephat counterparts ג (Ghimel, /ɣ/) and כ (Khaf, /x/). If you say “go” and then say the Scottish “loch,” you can feel your tongue move from the same general region but shift from a full stop to a friction sound.

6. Uvular — Deeper still. The very back of the tongue approaches the uvula — that small flap of tissue hanging at the back of your soft palate. Hebrew ק (Qof) is produced here, a voiceless uvular stop. It sounds similar to Kaf but originates deeper in the throat. In modern Hebrew the distinction has mostly collapsed, but in ancient and Yemenite pronunciation, Qof has a distinctly deeper, more emphatic quality. Modern Hebrew ר (Resh) is also often produced here as a uvular trill or approximant, similar to the French “r.”

7. Pharyngeal — Now we are in the throat itself. The pharynx — the muscular tube behind the mouth — can be constricted to produce sounds that have no equivalent in English. These are the distinctly Semitic “guttural” sounds that give Hebrew its character: ח (Chet, /ħ/) and ע (Ayin, /ʕ/). Chet is a voiceless pharyngeal fricative — a forceful, raspy whisper from the throat. Ayin is its voiced counterpart — the throat constricts the same way, but the vocal cords vibrate. If you have ever heard a native Arabic or Yemenite Hebrew speaker pronounce these letters, the sound is unmistakable.

8. Glottal — The deepest point. The glottis is the opening between the vocal cords themselves, at the very base of the throat. Hebrew א (Aleph) is a glottal stop — the tiny catch you make in the middle of “uh-oh.” Hebrew ה (He) is a glottal fricative — a simple, breathy /h/, like a gentle exhale.

That is the full journey — eight stations from lips to vocal cords. Every single Hebrew consonant has its home at one of these eight places.

Voiced and Voiceless

There is one more dimension to how sounds are made, and it is simple but important: whether your vocal cords vibrate.

Place your fingers gently on the front of your throat. Now say a long, sustained “zzzzz.” You will feel a buzzing vibration under your fingers. That is voicing — your vocal cords are vibrating.

Now switch to “sssss” without moving your tongue at all. Same mouth position, same airflow — but the buzzing stops. The sound is voiceless.

This single difference — vocal cords on or off — is what separates many Hebrew sound pairs:

• בּ /b/ (voiced) → פּ /p/ (voiceless) — same lips, different voicing
• דּ /d/ (voiced) → תּ /t/ (voiceless) — same tongue position, different voicing
• ז /z/ (voiced) → ס /s/ (voiceless) — same everything except the vocal cords
• גּ /g/ (voiced) → כּ /k/ (voiceless) — same back-of-tongue position, different voicing

Once you feel this distinction physically, you will never confuse these pairs again. Try it now: alternate between /s/ and /z/ with your fingers on your throat. Feel the switch turn on and off.

Manner of Articulation

Place tells you where in the mouth a sound is made. Manner tells you how the air is shaped when it gets there. There are several manners, and they are intuitive once you try them:

• Plosive (Stop) — Airflow is completely blocked, then released in a burst. Think of the pop of a /p/ or the punch of a /b/. The air builds up behind a closure — lips, tongue tip, or tongue back — and then breaks free. Hebrew plosives: בּ, פּ, דּ, תּ, כּ, גּ, ט, ק.

• Fricative — Airflow is narrowed but never fully stopped, creating a continuous friction or hissing sound. Think of the hiss of /s/ or the whisper of /f/. Hebrew fricatives: ב (Vet), פ (Fe), ס, שׁ, שׂ, ז, כ (Khaf), ח, ה, and the ancient soft forms of ג, ד, and ת.

• Nasal — The mouth closes, but air flows through the nose. Hum with your lips closed: that is /m/. Now press your tongue to the ridge and hum: that is /n/. Hebrew nasals: מ, נ.

• Lateral — Air flows around the sides of the tongue while the center is blocked. Hebrew has one lateral: ל (Lamed).

• Trill — The tongue vibrates rapidly. Classical Hebrew ר (Resh) was an alveolar trill, like the rolled “r” in Spanish or Italian.

• Affricate — A plosive and a fricative fused into one sound. The tongue makes a full stop, then releases into friction. Hebrew has one affricate: צ (Tsade), which combines /t/ + /s/ into a single motion.

• Approximant — The tongue approaches a surface without touching it or creating friction. The sound glides. Hebrew approximants: י (Yod) and ו (Vav, when pronounced as /w/).

The Begadkephat Connection

You have already seen that small dot — the dagesh — sitting inside certain Hebrew letters in earlier lessons. Now that you understand place and manner of articulation, we can explain what that dot is actually doing. The six begadkephat letters — בגדכפת — shift between plosive and fricative pronunciation depending on whether they carry a dagesh:

The pattern is consistent: the dagesh marks a full stop of airflow; without it, the air continues as friction. Same place, different manner. This is not an accident — it is a natural phonetic process called lenition (softening). When a consonant appears between vowels in flowing speech, the mouth tends to relax the closure slightly. Instead of a full stop-and-release, the articulators come close but let air through. The dagesh, in this context, is a written record of a physical reality.

We will explore the dagesh and these letter classifications in much more detail in Lesson 6. For now, the important thing is this: understanding place and manner of articulation turns the begadkephat pattern from something you memorize into something you can feel.

Why This Matters for Hebrew

You might be wondering: do I really need to know all this to read the Bible in Hebrew? The honest answer is no — not all of it, not right away. Many modern Hebrew speakers collapse several of these ancient distinctions. Tav and Tet sound identical. Kaf and Qof have merged. Chet and Khaf are often indistinguishable.

But here is why it matters:

It makes pronunciation logical. When you know that Chet is pharyngeal and Khaf is velar, you understand why they sound different in careful pronunciation — and why they tend to merge in casual speech. The system makes sense instead of feeling arbitrary.

It connects you to the ancient text. Biblical Hebrew was spoken by people who distinguished all of these sounds. The poetry of the Psalms, the wordplay of the prophets, the precision of the Torah — these were crafted for ears that heard the difference between Qof and Kaf, between Ayin and Aleph. Understanding articulation brings you closer to hearing what they heard.

It reveals hidden patterns. The Hebrew grammatical system — root letters, verb patterns, noun forms — often groups letters by their phonetic properties. Guttural letters (Aleph, He, Chet, Ayin) follow special rules precisely because of where they are produced. When you know the geography, the grammar makes more sense.

The interactive chart below lets you explore all of this visually. Click on any region of the vocal tract diagram to see which Hebrew letters are produced there, or browse the full classification table at the bottom.