![]() ![]() Regardless of the vowels chosen (which determine active/passive/reflexive/intensive/causative forms) the basic meaning of words is maintained. Words are typically formed from 3 consonant roots. Intuitively you can see that there is a challenging ambiguity that missing vowels create.įortunately, Hebrew is a little different from English in that the consonants carry most of the meaning. The second sentence hardly changes the meaning at all, and thus in context it will probably be much harder to choose between these two. With some effort we can redo sentences that are missing 90% of the vowels. With some effort we can read sentences that are missing 90% of the vowels.īut once again one could easily instead read:Ģ.The second example was: Wth sm ffort w cn rd sntncs tht re mssng 90% f th vwls. One would have to use context and other clues to decide which one was intended. To be honest, this second sentence sounds silly, but it actually makes some sense (educed – “means to bring forth or develop or infer something latent from data”). The hymn moaned so remarkably in its ability it educed meaning. The human mind is remarkable in its ability to decode meaning.īut a clever person could read this sentence as:Ģ.Take a minute and try to reconstruct these sentences. Wth sm ffort w cn rd sntncs tht re mssng 90% f th vwls. Th hmn mnd s rmrkbl in ts blty t dcd mnng. For comparison let’s consider a few simple English sentences written with only a few vowels: Reading the Bible in this original form is certainly possible but presents unique challenges even for native Hebrew speakers. The presence of these four letters gives a slight indication of some intended vowels. Unlike our English alphabet, each of these consonants is a pictograph and has a meaning shown in the chart (from the ancient Hebrew research center).įour of these consonants can serve as vowels: א (alef), ו (waw), ה (he) and י (yod). There are 23 consonants in the Hebrew alphabet. Rabbinical literature, particularly the Book of Legends (Sefer Ha-aggadah), that I have been reading, is filled with fascinating commentary and discussion on various word and vowel choices and how they change or influence the meaning of biblical texts. However, this system is a relatively recent invention, created between the 7 th and the 10 th century AD!! It is just one opinion about the “right” vowels. This is the origin of the authoritative Masoretic text. In order to codify the oral tradition, the Masoretes developed a system of vowel pointing (nikkudot), placed either above, below or beside the consonants, to indicate the vowel sound to use to pronounce each syllable. It is important to realize that the orthodox Jews believe that the vowels were inspired by God and passed down to Moses, but they were transmitted only in the Jewish oral tradition accompanying the Bible. This fragment of Leviticus from the Dead Sea Scroll collection shows that the earliest Biblical manuscripts were in an early “paleo” Hebrew and did not have any vowels. Biblical Hebrew originally had no written system of vowels. ![]()
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