I was looking up how to put a little Hebrew inside a LaTeX document and ran across a good answer on tex.
stackexchange.
Short answer: use the cjhebrew package.
In a nutshell, you put your Hebrew text between < and > using the cjhebrew package’s transliteration.
You write left-to-right, and the text will appear right-to-left.
For example, <lp> produces using ‘ for א, l for ל, and p for ף.
The code for each Hebrew letter is its English transliteration, with a three exceptions.
First, when two Hebrew letters roughly correspond to the same English letter, one form may have a dot in front of it.
For example, ט and ת both make a t sound; the former is encoded as .
t and the latter as t.
Second, five Hebrew letters have a different form when used at the end of a word [1].
For such letters the final form is the capitalized value of the regular form.
For example, פ and its final form ף are denoted by p and P respectively.
The package will automatically choose between regular and final forms, but you can override this by using the capital letter in the middle of a word or by using a | after a regular form at the end of a word.
Finally, the letter ש is written with a /s The author already used s for ס and .
s for צ, so he needed a new symbol to encode a third letter corresponding to s [2].
Also ש has a couple other forms.
The letter can make either the sh or s sound, and you may see dots on top of the letter to distinguish these.
The cjhebrew package uses +s for ש with a dot on the top right, the sh sound, and ,s for ש with a dot on the top left, the s sound.
Here is the complete consonant transliteration table from the cjhebrew documentation.
Note that the code for א is a single quote and the code for ע is a back tick (grave accent) `.
You can also add vowel points (niqqud).
These are also represented by their transliteration to English sounds, with one exception.
The sh’va is either silent or represents a schwa sound, so there’s not a convenient transliterations.
But the sh’va looks like a colon, so it is represented by a colon.
See the package documentation for more details.
Related posts Use of Aleph in math Fraktur symbols in math Math symbols in TeX, HTML, and Unicode [1] You may have seen something similar in Greek with sigma σ and final sigma ς.
Even English had something like this.
For example, people used to use a different form of t at the end of a word.
My mother wrote this way.
[2] It would be more phonetically faithful to transliterate צ as ts, but that would make the LaTeX package harder to implement since it would have to disambiguate whether ts represents צ or תס.
.