Kamatz  Kamatz or qamatz (, ) is a Hebrew niqqud (vowel) sign represented by two perpendicular lines (looking like an uppercase T) underneath a letter. In modern Hebrew (Sephardi/Israeli), it usually indicates the phoneme which is the "a" sound in the word "a cappella" and is transliterated as "a ". In these cases, its sound is identical to the sound of ' in modern Hebrew. In a minority of cases it indicates the phoneme , equal to the sound of '. The Hebrew of the late centuries BCE and early centuries of the Common Era had a system with five phonemic long vowels and five short vowels . In the later dialects of the 1st millennium CE, phonemic vowel length disappeared, and instead was automatically determined by the context, with vowels pronounced long in open syllables and short in closed ones. However, the previous vowel phonemes merged in various ways that differed from dialect to dialect:  The result is that in Modern Hebrew, the vowel written with qamatz might be pronounced as either [a] or [o], depending on historical origin. It is often said that the two sounds can be distinguished by context:  Unfortunately, the two varieties of shwa are written identically, and pronounced identically in Modern Hebrew; as a result, there is no reliable way to distinguish the two varieties of qamatz when followed by a vowel marked with a shwa. (In some cases, Biblical texts are marked with a "metheg" or other cantillation mark that helps to indicate which pronunciation is intended, but this usage is not consistent, and in any case such marks are absent in non-Biblical texts.) An example of the "qamatz qatan" is the Modern Hebrew word (, "program"). According to the standard Hebrew spelling rules as published by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, words which have a qamatz qatan in their base form must be written without a vav, hence the standard vowel-less spelling of is . In practice, however, Modern Hebrew words containing a qamatz qatan do add a "vav" to indicate the pronunciation; hence the "nonstandard" spelling is common in newspapers and is even used in several dictionaries, for example Rav Milim. Words, which in their base form have a that changes to in declension, retain the "vav" in vowel-less spelling: the noun (, "freedom") is spelled in vowel-less texts; the adjective (, "free") is spelled in vowel-less text, despite the use of qamatz qatan, both according to the standard spelling and in common practice.