Hebrew Script

The Hebrew alphabet is the oldest non-ideographic script still used today, although it hasn’t always had its current form. The above image represents some of the letters twice because they are written differently at the ends of words. They’re also written from right to left, unlike this Latin script, Greek, Cyrillic and the Indian and Indo-Chinese scripts. It interests me that characters written from left to right tend to be open on the right hand side and those written the other way are on the left. Vertically written scripts are not open at the top or bottom though.

Technically, Hebrew script isn’t an alphabet but an abjad, because in their purest form the actual letters only represent consonants. This is also the case with the related Arabic script, for the same reason: Semitic languages rely on triliteral consonantal roots for the basic meaning of their words and the vowels provide the inflection. This may seem foreign at first until one realises that both English and the insular Celtic languages do something similar for some words. For instance, we talk of one “foot” but two “feet” and we “take” a pill but “took” it in the past. The difference with Semitic languages is that this is the norm. We can also manage quite well even in English without vowels a lot of the time, as with text messages and note form, so it isn’t that big an issue that Hebrew is traditionally written without vowels.

The original Hebrew script looked like this:

A slightly modified of this script is still used by the Samaritans, and it should be remembered that although they are quite a small community, the Samaritans do still exist and are by no means pursuing a dead or dying religion. The Samaritan faith is still Abrahamic and they claim that their own written Torah is the original, unlike the one followed by the Jews and Christians. This older script is the one which appeared on the wall at Belshazzar’s Feast in Daniel chapter 5:

This is not how it would’ve looked. The absence of vowels allows the writing to be read in at least two different ways. As verbs they read “numbered, weighed, divided”. As nouns, they appear to be a list of monetary units. The two are of course compatible because of the link between weights of precious metals and money, as can be seen in English with the word “pound”.

The absence of vowels from the original Hebrew script is the original state of alphabetic writing. Egyptian hieroglyphics also lack vowels, although there’s a tendency to treat them as if `ayin and the glottal stop are in fact vowels. Again, Ancient Egyptian and its modern descendant Coptic are Semitic languages, and hieroglyphics had a lot else going on in it which made it more legible. Another feature of Hebrew is that since the Semitic peoples invented entirely letter-based scripts in the first place, the names of the letters reflect their predecessor symbols and the objects they represented. For instance ד , daleth, still means “door” and ג , gimel, still means “camel”. This connection was lost after the letters were adopted into Greek because that’s an Indo-European language.

The older Hebrew script appeared during the Dark Age after the Bronze Age Collapse, an unexplained incident in the late Bronze Age when the civilisations of the Eastern Mediterranean all fell at the same time. This was about 3 300 years ago. The style in which it’s written in today dates from about a millennium later. For Hebrew, two attempts were made to include vowels. The first, matres lectionis, used certain consonants to represent them, which is also how Greek did it: our current vowels all used to be consonantal letters whose sounds were absent or not considered significant in Greek. For Hebrew this meant that some letters would be used as vowels in some instances and consonants in others. However, because there are semivowels this wasn’t necessarily a problem, since in a way some vowels are simply semivowels pronounced as syllables such as W and U, and Y and I. Incidentally, for some reason Latin is used a lot to refer to aspects of Hebrew writing, and I’m not sure why this is or whether the Jews themselves use these terms. I suspect it’s something to do with the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church.

The other method, similar to the system used in Arabic, is to express the vowels using dots and other shapes above and below the consonants, in conjunction with semivowels used within the line. This is known as Tiberian niqqud. Neqqudot were introduced, I hear, so as not to alter the sacred script of the Tanakh, although I’m not seeing this because of its use of yod and waw (more on my spelling of those shortly) for long vowels. A text with neqqudot looks like this:

בְּרֵאשִׁית, בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם, וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ.

(that’s the beginning of Genesis).

There’s also daghesh and the schwas. Daghesh is a dot which converts a letter from a stop such as V to a plosive such as B, and is similar to, although also opposite to, a similar practice in Irish script where dots are placed about letters such as B and C, which is another odd connection between Insular Celtic and Semitic languages although this time probably coincidental, assuming the others aren’t. Schwas, which I feel pressure to write as “Š^ewas” because then it contains one of them, are murmured vowels such as are common in English, but in the case of Hebrew there are a number of them, including silent ones, each with their own pronunciation (except the silent ones!).

All of the above is not a complete description of how Hebrew script works, and I’ve learned it as a gradual process once I picked up the consonants. I’m not sure when I started, but one of the things which has characterised my study of the script is that much of it was done in fairly emotionally fraught circumstances. One way of dating it is the birth and naming of my brother Jonathan. He was born a dozen weeks premature and not expected to live, although he did. My mother named him Jonathan, which in Hebrew is יוֹנָתָן, meaning “a gift from G-d” because of his unexpected arrival and survival. I nicknamed him “Jod”, pronounced “yod”, at an early stage because it was the first letter of his name and, like it, he was very small, at birth that is. This implies that I had some knowledge of Hebrew script when I was six, and the situation in which I used it was rather stressful and upsetting. A few years later, when I think I was nine, I’d familiarised myself thoroughly with the Greek alphabet, I was once again in difficult circumstances but was able to avail myself of a one-volume encyclopædia which listed several scripts side by side, including Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Phœnician along with their meanings and names. I escaped into this to avoid the difficulties in my life at the time, as a form of escapism, and consequently memorised the whole Hebrew alphabet along with the Phœnician script in less than a week. Later on, I attempted to learn Hebrew itself, which I’ve found very difficult and I’ve had several goes.

One result of the way I learnt Hebrew writing is that my pronunciation of the language is most unlike that of either the Ashkenazim or Sephardim and follows the reconstructed pronunciation used in the times the Tanakh was first being set down in writing. I can’t hear modern Hebrew pronunciation without perceiving it as really grating and strongly accented, might I say “wrongly accented”? Several of the letter pronunciations have changed or fallen together, and these also vary according to accent. I mentioned “yod” and “waw” earlier. In fact, waw is now pronounced something like “vov” because, I think, of the influence of the German language, and also it goes against the grain to write “yod” with a Y rather than a J, but that’s just me. Also, perhaps the most difficult thing to accept of all is the way “resh” is pronounced, as it’s now a uvular R as in Parisian French and Southern German rather than an alveolar one as in Russian or Arabic, and this just sounds really wrong to me. I presume the Sephardic pronunciation is still alveolar but the vowels are all pronounced “clearly” as they would be in Castilian. One issue with pronouncing resh as uvular is that it brings it quite close to the fricative version of gimel, which I would expect to lead to confusion. `Ayin and ‘aleph seem to have combined as the latter, and the emphatic consonants, which are simultaneously articulated in the throat and the mouth, have become identical to their dental or alveolar equivalents. Also quite grating is the way cheth is now pronounced as “ch” in “loch” rather than as a voiceless pharyngeal. Modern Hebrew has diverged quite drastically from Arabic in its pronunciation. It’s a matter of personal taste, but so much of Modern Hebrew pronunciation, at least in Israel, just seems very “wrong” to me. I don’t know about the political and historical significance of this approach, although I find it strange that the revival of Hebrew, which seemed so purist and conservative in many ways (e.g. many more of the words are taken from Hebrew morphemes rather than adopting Greek and Latin forms) also seemed to adopt such a radically different set of pronunciations. It probably comes down to accent.

This change is reflected in the letters used, for instance ת, ט are both “t”, ס, שׂ are both “s”, and this is where it gets weird, because of the way the Hebrew script has been used to write Yiddish and Ladino (for more on those languages see this post), which makes them both hard for me to read. I’m unsurprisingly more familiar with Yiddish and can follow the spoken version quite easily on the whole, but when written it seems to make consistently strange choices regarding consonants. Yiddish spelling does vary, in a similar way to English, in that it doesn’t modify the way Hebrew words in the language are written, so they will appear with the usual vowel pointing and consonants as they would in the Tanakh, but the Indo-European portion of the language writes /t/ as “ט‎” and /k/ as “ק”, which to me is “Q”, pronounced uvularly. This is very distracting when reading it. It also has a quite different approach to vowels, which are generally adapted consonantal letters in writing. For instance, “ע” is “E”, and “אַ” representing “A” can occur anywhere in a word even if there’s no glottal stop. “יי” is used to represent “ey” and “ײַ” “ay”, and there are a number of other oddities which mean that a language I ought to be able to read easily is in fact quite difficult for me. Incidentally, there is a language academy for it called YIVO, which stands for “ייִדישער װיסנשאַפֿטלעכער אינסטיטוט” or “Yiddisher Visnshaftlekher Institut”, now based in New York City but actually founded in the 1920s in Vilnius, which not all Yiddish writing or spelling follows.

As for Ladino, I’m less familiar with it or its spelling. I’ve talked about its appeal before, but for me it amounts to Spanish with all the weird stuff taken out of it. It’s not Castilian of course, and it kind of feels like the way Latin ought to be if it had survived to the present day. I can easily imagine a timeline where Rome never fell and most people on the planet speak this language, minus its specifically Jewish elements. However, it is a Jewish language and as such is written using the Hebrew script. That said, the actual forms of the letters are somewhat altered as it uses Rashi Script, the letters in which the writings of the French rabbi Rashi, whose pseudonym is an acronym for the Hebrew for “Rabbi of Israel” or “Our Rabbi, may he live” and whose real name is Shlomo Yitzchaki and lived in the eleventh Christian century, were written:

Rashi is substantially known for his extensive commentary on the Talmud, and commentaries have in turn been written on his own commentary, leading to the distinctive layout of the Talmud page:

It can be seen that Rashi’s commentary, in a square ring around the central text, is notably different than the rest of the text on the page. Rashi also wrote a commentary on the Tanakh, focussing particularly on the written Torah. Ladino is written using this script.

Unlike Yiddish, Ladino lacks an official standard and this applies to spelling as well as everything else. It’s also written in Latin script. When Rashi script is used, the vowels in particular are somewhat vague, because letters are used for them and each can have several values. Aleph, for example (I don’t know how to type Rashi script on a computer) can be A, E or O, and double vav (i.e. “waw”) can stand for U, O, V or W. This is reminiscent of Scandinavian runes, each of which can stand for more than one sound. The consonants are easier to read, with a tendency to add yod to them to indicate some form of palatisation.

Then there’s the cursive.

I have to admit I simply cannot read or write Hebrew cursive, as I’ve mentioned before. When I write Hebrew, I use the square script and it probably looks quite infantile. Unfortunately for me, it’s a popular script for Ladino and it also gave rise to the handwriting used in Israel and among the Ashkenazim. I can’t say much about it because I don’t know it. Most of the letters look nothing like their printed versions to me.

A long time ago I remember hearing the observation that Hebrew is the language chosen to make the divine revelation. This is clearly not a universalist view, as it means that there is the true religion and everything else, and the same attitude is taken towards Arabic and Sanskrit. Even so, I think it’s important to be authentic in the way one approaches spiritual matters so as not to lose touch with one’s religious community and become kind of “rootless”. Another observation regarding Hebrew script is that the hooks at the top of every letter have been interpreted as a reminder that they are being handed down from on high. Solitreo and other cursive forms of Hebrew script lack these hooks, but are used for profane purposes anyway so that may be just as well.

I believe in principle that a religious person who is literate and whose faith includes sacred texts should make an effort to read them in the original language, as far as is possible. I also think this about non-religious texts: that literature and philosophy for instance should be read in the language they were written in. I do this with German philosophy and literature. To this end I have made fairly successful attempts at learning New Testament Greek and rather less wonderful efforts to learn Biblical Hebrew. Nonetheless I see it as incumbent upon me, to the extent that I consider the Tanakh inspiring, to keep trying. I have a head start over some people through having been somewhat familiar with the script since almost as long ago as I learnt to read English. The uncanny similarities with Gàidhlig are also intriguing and helpful. Otherwise, the problem is that one is beholden to the values and beliefs embodied in translations. It’s similar to handing over ethical responsibility to particular companies: you don’t know where it’s been. Claims are often made regarding the homophobia of certain Biblical passages, for example, on both sides, and the appeal is often made to translation errors and biasses. These can to some extent be overcome by reading the said passages in Hebrew and Greek, although even there one is subject to bias that might be introduced in the way one learns those languages, and historical and social context is also so important.

Nonetheless, it’s important for a member of an Abrahamic faith to use Hebrew if they can, and I am indeed such a person, so that’s what I have to do.