Here’s a description, which has some terms you need to know,
so read this part even if you stop at the end of it.
The Hebrew alphabet is really a syllabary. Each letter is thought of, by default, as a
consonant plus “a” as in “father”.
Except for two letters which have no sound of their own.
Somebody I know who read some ancient book on Hebrew thought
these two letters represented glottal stops.
Not in spoken Hebrew they don’t.
Not even in the traditional chant used to read Torah on Sabbath in the
synagogue. They are a matter of
spelling, not a matter of pronunciation.
There has been some speculation that one of them originally
had a sort of glided sound in the throat like the Greek gamma, and that was
used to explain why the Septuagint (Greek) version of the Torah has “Gomorrah”
when in Hebrew it’s pronounced “Amorah.”
The cursive Hebrew letter even looks like a Greek gamma.
It doesn’t have that sound now, so don’t sweat it. I just included that factoid because you
might hear about it some time.
Sofit This
is a description of some Hebrew letters which have two shapes, one of which
only appears at the end of a word. Count
yourself lucky. Arabic has four shapes
for some letters, and so does its descendant Syriac.
One letter does have four forms, if you want to count it
that way: one plain with the “kh” sound back in your throat; one with a dot in
it that is “k”; one at the end of a word with a vowel that makes it “kha” which
is a masculine gender ending; and one at the end of a word with a shva
in it that makes it “kh” again, a feminine gender ending.
Dagesh This is
a dot in the middle of some letters. It
changes the sound of some of them. It is
part of the spelling rules and all you care about is to recognize when you have
to say a letter differently because of dagesh. Some letters never take dagesh and
I’ll point them out.
Shva is two
vertically placed dots under a letter.
This is also a spelling rule, but sometimes shva has a sound you
may have been taught about in school, the schwa e, which is kind of a
half-vowel sound. Schwa is a
German version of shva.
A little orientation.
Hebrew is a Semitic language. It is a northwest Semitic language from the
same sub-family as K'naani/Ugaritic, from which it gets its original alphabet
and letter forms. The ancient
Mesopotamian language Akkadian is a northeast Semitic language closely related
to Aramaic.
The northwest Semitic languages began splitting from
Akkadian about 2000 BCE. Ugaritic had a
written form by 1300 BCE and notes in its writing system appear on tablets in
Egypt from the reign of Akhenaten.
Written Hebrew with a distinct letter form from Ugaritic
developed by 800 BCE. One tablet from
1000 BCE is probably also Hebrew.
Hebrew letters double as numbers, in a base-10 system.
Somebody once suggested to me that since there are no
letters in Hebrew that always represent vowels, a given set of Hebrew letters
can represent almost any word. That's
not true. If you wrote down a sentence
in English without the vowels, after some puzzling you could make out what it
means.
Writing is only a record of words already known from a
spoken language. Before developing a
system of writing, a spoken language develops a grammar, a syntax, a set of
idioms, and a morphological system that represents things like tense, mood,
number, person, whether a verb is reflexive, whether a noun changes according
to its use in the sentence, all the things that writing records but only in
oral form. The only exception I can
think of is Esperanto, an artificial human language developed to be perfectly
regular. I don’t know how many people
speak it.
By the time writing develops, it has to record the spoken
language, not make the language up, and people who know how to read understand
when the sentence should have a past tense verb or when a noun should be in the
instrumental case. It's not free form at
all.
You've probably heard about variants in the Bible that
scholars tabulated. I did some
statistics on that for Torah, which you probably call the Pentateuch. The scholars worked in the 800s CE; the Torah
was first put into writing about 12 centuries before that. It was written without vowel marks, but the
scholars worked on a written text that did have vowels. They marked every word that varied from what
it was supposed to be. Only 6% of the
5845 verses in Torah are marked; 5% are marked as having spelling errors and 1%
are marked as being written in a way that varies from their pronunciation.
So the variants were not an alternative form of Hebrew, it’s
just that the copy the scholars worked from had mistakes in it. They marked them and moved on. None of the mistakes made any difference to
Jewish culture. Judaism ran by a set of
laws that was based on the oral reading of Torah, not on the spelling in that
particular copy of Torah.
All right. That's a
lot of words but hopefully you now understand that the written form of Hebrew,
even without vowel marks, means what it means because it records the same words
used in speaking Hebrew. Next, the
picture that is worth a thousand words.
© Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
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