h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

(1) That transliteration of the blessing is in the Ashkenazi accent. I find this pretty awesome. For those wondering what it would sound like in modern Israeli Hebrew, the transliteration would be something like this:
Barukh ata adonay, eloheynu melekh ha-olam, asher kidshanu be-mitzvotav ve-tzivanu lehadlik ner shel Khanuka.
(For the slightly more linguistically-inclined, the main difference is that Ashkenazi Hebrew turns the long A sound into an O sound, while modern Israeli Hebrew keeps it as A but doesn't really differentiate between long and short vowels[]; some other long vowels tend to get a bit of a '-y' to them, in Ashkenazi Hebrew, such as the long Os becoming OYs [oy vey...] and long Es becoming EYs. Since I myself am only _slightly_ linguistically-inclined, this is the best way I have to describe this. I hope it wasn't too confusing.)

[] As an aside: this lack of differentiation is why, despite the fact I generally don't have an Israeli accent, I need to be a bit more careful when talking about the seashore or bedlinen...

(2) I think when talking about holiday songs with Dmitri I might have over-emphasised the Zionistic take on the holiday, and given him a bit of a wrong impression; it's not like _all_ Hanukkah songs in israel are this militaristic. A lot of them are just children songs about verious aspects of the holiday. Off the top of my head, here are a few more benign examples:
'Kad katan, kad katan, shmona yamim shamno natan' ('Little jug, little jug, for eight days it gave its oil') - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh-QwcEAfFQ
'Ner li, ner li, ner li dakik / Ba-Khanuka neri adlik / Ba-Khanuka neri ya'ir / Ba-Khanuka shirim ashir' ('I have a candle, I have a candle, I have a thin little candle / In Hanukkah I will light my candle / In Hanukkah my candle will spread light / In Hanukkah I will sing songs') - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBseWYxCsnI
'Immi afta leviva li, leviva chama u-metuka / Yod'im atem likhvod ma? Likhvod ha-Khanuka' ('My mother made me a latke, a warm sweet latke / Do you know what for? For Hanukkah'; later verses also mention a dreyd of cast lead [] and 'gelt') - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QkvjIihp4E (Sorry about the quality, but that's the only version I found that sounds like how _most_ people sing this. And Dmitri, you'll be interested to note that in looking up some of the exact words, I found out that this was originally a Yiddish song! http://www.zemereshet.co.il/song.asp?id=3 )
'Sevivon, sov sov sov, Khanuka hu khag tov' ('Dreydl, go round and round and round, Hanukkah is a good holiday') - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nYJMG-2QOg
'Khanuka, Khanuka, khag yafe kol kakh / Or khaviv mi-saviv, gil le-yeled rakh / Khanuka, Khanuka, sevivon sov sov / Sov na, sov, sov na, sov, ma na'im va-tov!' ('Hanukkah, Hanukkah, such a lovely holiday / Nice light all around, joy for a young child / Hanukkah, Hanukkah, dreydl goes round and round / Round and round, round and round, how pleasant, how good!') - Been surprisingly hard to find a link for this one. This one has alright quality, but the lyrics are different for some reason: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzDw7TUu1Jg while this one has the lyrics all Israeli kids know and love, but is performed by two incredibly annoying guys who probably think they are being funny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dfhtz0yyBsM (Also, you might notice some musical similarity to 'Jingle Bells' in this one; I don't know if it was intentional, but it's fun to mix the two up sometimes.)

There are so much more - looking for links I kept getting reminded of more - but this should be a good sample.

[] In case you're wondering if Operation Cast Lead is actually related to a chlidren song: yes, it is. It was done on Hanukkah, so I guess somebody at the naming section thought this was clever.

Thanks for those notes, Lady P.

Sorry about the Ashkenazi Hebrew. Of course, that's the way I learned what (little) I know.

Another difference is accent placement. Still another is pronouncing the -ot/-at ending as -es. ShabBAT becomes SHABbes.

I was teaching a couple of young women from Nazareth in college. They were Palestinian. When they heard that I wanted to improve my Hebrew, they sent home for a copy of their primer book and gave me lessons.

They tended to get the giggles when I pronounced the word for 'moon' - levanah - as 'le-VO-neh'.

As in this song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSOqmSxXxwE&feature=related

This is not a Hanukkah song, by the way.

Pshaw, there's no need to apologise!
From a linguistic point of view, even though modern Israeli Hebrew is the version that is now actually being spoken as a native tongue, that does not make it any more 'right' than Ashkenazi Hebrew; and the transliteration as you wrote it is the one that will be familiar to many Jews around the world. I just wanted to add the native-speaker angle, since I figured it's interesting.
I did forget to mention that the Ashkenazi accent changes the, well, accent. It's hard to tell how Classical Hebrew was pronounced, but I think it's generally understood that modern Israeli Hebrew is closer to it in that aspect - the accent is nearly always placed on the last syllable of a word. With some exceptions.
The t->s thing is interesting, and perhaps a bit more complex than I am able to explain. The thing is that Hebrew has two forms of T - one is sorta 'heavier', while the other one sounds like a regular English T (in modern Hebrew they both sound the same, although they are still represented by different letters). The second kind can be stressed or unstressed, which again, doesn't make any difference in modern Hebrew, but originally the unstressed ones sounded like the TH in 'think'. Anyway, in Ashkenazi Hebrew, that unstressed T/TH thing got represented as a S sound. Thus, for example, the Hebrew word TakhLIT (purpose, aim, intent) is, in Ashkenazi Hebrew, TAKHles.
(The latter form was adopted back into modern Hebrew with a slightly different meaning - it's a colloquial word meaning something like 'basically', or 'when you get down to it'.)

Okay, I'm done. I hope any of that was coherent at all.

Hey, that's great. I didn't know that. So 'tet' and 'tav' are pronounced differently. Cool.

Originally they were. In modern Hebrew this distinction is gone (as is the case of similar distinctions, like between 'qof' and 'kaf'; basically, we made the language a lot flatter ). It still exists in Arabic, though - I'm pretty sure that even in [most] dialects.

You know, I'll bet you're right. That happens with related languages - one retains a difference, one doesn't.

When I was about 10, a teacher asked me, 'Can you hear the different between 'weather' and 'whether'?'

I could. Later, I found out the distinction had disappeared in most forms of English.