Before me it was Nechtav - article summary
Shortly before Shavuot, I posted my Jewish Link article about “bəfanay nechtav” (paywalled Substack, HTML, flipdocs). Here I would like to summarize and slightly expand on it, in a way that a Substack post allows for. The sheva in the title was removed in editing.
The short of it is:
The grammatically correct pronunciation is “nichtav” with a chirik, but “nechtam” with a segol
Yet “everyone” uses a segol for both
Reasons this may be a combination of:
Ashkenazim pronounce their chaf and chet the same, so the words sound almost identical except for their final consonant
unfamiliarity with why the second word gets the segol, plus overcorrection
vowel harmony
The “everyone” can be be explored on YUTorah, with hundreds of thousands of audio shiurim, making it a great phonological resource for linguists studying Yeshivish.
This exploration can be first based on text search, which is only in the titles and the meta-data given by (probably) students. But you can confirm one by one by listening to the audio.
Since YU just finished a full year of Gittin, there is plenty of phonological evidence of the pronunciation of nechtav.
There are noted exceptions to the “everyone” among the YU rabbeim - one who is very precise in his pronunciation generally, one who gives a daf yomi shiur and changed to the more precise from seven years ago to present day
If enough people in a geographically based socioreligious group pronounce the word a certain “erroneous” way, does that actually make it correct? Compare with American English, Galilean Aramaic. This is the Yeshivish language.
Also, see the Rambam, who explains that Hillel would pronounce hin as in to match the (erroneous) pronunciation of his teacher, Shemaya and Avyalyon.
One last point is that in the Kaufmann manuscript (the only complete manuscript of Mishnah), the second word is נתחתם. I didn’t mention it in the article, but the same is true in the Mishnah in Yerushalmi Gittin.
There are more details, so feel free to read the full article.
Given that a Substack post differs from a print article, I feel like I can expand on a few points here.
Firstly, here is a link to YUTorah. The website says (as I write this today) that you can search through 315,841 shiurim. I think most of them are audio shiurim.
In that search bar, you can type “nichtav” and press Enter. You get six results, two of which are Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz’s daf yomi shiur from last week (for some reason, it is a duplicate). The filter in place is nichtav, and the categories are Gemara (6) and Daf Yomi (2), with overlap.
Note that in many cases, the word nichtav is in the title. For Rabbi Shmuel Marcus, Gittin 2a, it doesn’t appear. But looking at the full page for the shiur, we get the description, which we may consider meta-data, with the word nichtav appearing.
Meanwhile, looking for “nechtav”, there are 47 shiurim - thus, a whole lot more.
Again, many of these are in the title or in the meta-data. And these might be produced by students, the website maintainers / uploaders, rather than the rabbis delivering the shiurim themselves. We need to listen to each shiur.
There are also many more than 47 + 6 shiurim in play with nichtav / nechtav. It is just that these were the ones with those titles or metadata. The real search should be something like Gittin 2a (44 shiurim), or “Gittin” and then looking at the first in the series.
A few examples of audio to flesh this out.
Here is Rav Hershel Schachter in the Gittin shiur series, #9.
Here is Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz, around seven years ago on Gittin 2a (where the title is nechtav).
And here he is from this year, where the title is nichtav, with careful enunciation of nichtav:
An additional point I didn’t mention in the article. I think that the explicit pronunciation of the word nechtam (later in the phrase) or even mentally (where one only says the בפני נכתב part) primes the speaker to say nechtav. Absent such a prompt, a Yeshivish speaker should say nichtav.
Since we have such a large linguistic resource, we can simply look to other places in the Talmud where nichtav appears, where there is no nechtam. For instance, Sanhedrin 71a:
כמאן אזלא הא דתניא בן סורר ומורה לא היה ולא עתיד להיות ולמה נכתב דרוש וקבל שכר כמאן כרבי יהודה
The Gemara asks: In accordance with whose opinion is that which is taught in a baraita: There has never been a stubborn and rebellious son and there will never be one in the future, as it is impossible to fulfill all the requirements that must be met in order to apply this halakha. And why, then, was the passage relating to a stubborn and rebellious son written in the Torah? So that you may expound upon new understandings of the Torah and receive reward for your learning, this being an aspect of the Torah that has only theoretical value. In accordance with whose opinion is this? It is in accordance with the opinion of Rabbi Yehuda, who requires that the parents have certain identical characteristics, making it virtually impossible to apply the halakha.
Here is Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz again, on Sanhedrin 71, at the 12 minute mark.