User blog comment:Mrlmm0605/Let's Talk Bleach! - Part 4: Yhwach/@comment-1387259-20150624222019

I can respect a guy who can dig up good HU songs for a blog post. Anywho,

Fun fact about God's name in the original Hebrew. The letters that make up the name, "יהוה", have no "canonical" pronunciation, if you will. This is because Hebrew letters are actually all consonants (vowels were later added in as diacritical marks, though are only really commonly used by people teaching and learning the language, not often by native speakers in reading or writing). The letters in order (right to left) are called "Yud, Hey, Vav, Hey", which are actually pronounced "Y-H-V-H" (among the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, there's actually no "W", but English words with W's that are transliterated into Hebrew will generally use the Vav, or the V, in its place; likewise the J is often replaced with a Yud, "Y", as exemplified by one of the patriarchs of Judaism defined in the Torah, Jacob, who was in Hebrew called Yaakov). Every Hebrew word, both modern and biblical, has grammatically accepted vowel sounds when spoken, even if they are not always written as such. Of course, one word, "יהוה", was not. One reasoning for this, as interpreted by many modern-day Rabbis, is that no man was meant to know how to say the true name of God. Out of potential fear or uncertainty of what would happen should someone get it right, many other pronunciations, that do not match the letters at all, were used instead, among them being things such as "Adonai", "El"/"Elohai"/"Elohim" (which is also the Hebrew word for the English improper noun "god"/"gods"), and "Hashem" (which actually just means "The Name"). Obviously, given the letters, anyone could try and guess what the proper pronunciation is without truly knowing if they're right or wrong. Two of the most commonly used and accepted "guesses" are "Ya-ve" (romanized as "Yahweh"), and "Yahova" ("Jehovah").