Today's Jewish Fact of the Day

[pennywhistle]

The Hebrew Alphabet

Ahh, the Hebrew Alphabet. The Alephbet. Drilled into my head from a very young age. I only know it in order if I sing it ^_~



Hebrew reads right to left, so start with Alef on the right. Yes, there are two versions of some letters. That's because they're the final versions of the letters. You use them when that letter comes at the end of a word. Take Ma'am for a bad example. You would use the first Mem for the first "m" and Final Mem for the last "m." Yes, there are two silent letters. They're there to help the vowels along. But yet, there are no vowels. Confusing, isn't it? There are no written vowels in most Hebrew writing. There are some helper lines and dots known as "nikkud" (points). These were created to show where the vowel sounds go. They go below, above, or to the side of the letter, and don't interfere with the letter. Up through Hebrew School till I graduated high school, I always read Hebrew with the helper vowels (except during my Bat Mitzvah, but that was memorized). It wasn't until I took Hebrew in college that I really learned how to read it without the vowels.

And of course, the letters above are just printed Hebrew. There's cursive Hebrew too (which I find much easier to write ^_^)



That's the cursive of Hebrew letters above.

I've forgotten most of what I learned from my college Hebrew class :-( I'd love to take that up again.

Thanks to jewfaq.org for the pictures.

Comments

[kwanboa.livejournal.com]

Man, so hard....*pokes the letters sadly* Only one I remember is the gimel...because either you...won everything or lost everything if you got it when you played dreidel....

[malanai.livejournal.com]

LOL. You win everything with gimel. You lose everything with nun.

[kwanboa.livejournal.com]

XD! I used to have quite a few plastic dreidels...but of course since my parents had no idea how to play, and then in elementary school when the parents of the Jewish kids gave us dreidels and we were so lost...it turned into just spinning-go-whee. ^^;;;;;;

A few weeks ago I got in the mood for the Dreidel Song from South Park so I downloaded it on Leigh's computer and went spinning like a dreidel around the apartment singing loudly...one of his roomies looked at me oddly. "You do...know...that's pretty derogatory, right?" "...Isn't one of them Jewish in real life? Plus, I wanted to be Jewish when I was 4 and so I can sing it!" "..." "Don't question my logic! I AM ALWAYS RIIIIIGHT!"

[teaandbitchery.livejournal.com]

That's so fun...I love the look of the letters (then again, I think it's cool when a language uses another alphabet besides the one that we use in English).

It's also cool because you can see the Indo-European roots in some of those- the first couple of letter names are very similar to the first couple of Greek letter name (alpha, beta, gamma, delta...there's even a similar to lamda in there). Then again, I could be reaching. :)

I'm digging way back in my brain here

[antithiscully.livejournal.com]

no, you're not reaching. I'm sure there's someone with an actual education in this kind of thing out there reading this, but I do know that the Etruscans (upon whose alphabet the Greek and then Roman ones are based) based their alphabet on the Semetic alphabet (which was the first to assign solely sounds to individual letters, as opposed to earlier pictoral alphabets, like Egyptian heiroglyphics, where a symbol meant a sound, a word, or part of a word, depending on what else it was grouped with.)

Gotta love half-assed knowledge :)

Re: I'm digging way back in my brain here

[teaandbitchery.livejournal.com]

The Greek alphabet is actually based upon that the Minoans had- Linear B, to be exact. (There's Linear A, but, it can't be deciphered, as Linear A was Minoan letters with Minoan language, but Linear B is actually Minoan letters used to write Greek.)

A simple search on Yahoo would seem to indicate that the Etruscan alphabet was derived from the Greek, which would make sense since a lot of Greeks eventually settled in Italy...I just wasn't aware that they were the ancestors of the Romans...(though, that would clear up a little bit of the Aenaed.)

But in any case, most alphebetic languages seem to have started with the Phoenicians. At least the Indo-European ones, but, I wasn't sure if the Hebrew language was considered Indo-European or not.

s'what I get for digging

[antithiscully.livejournal.com]

I knew the Etruscans were in there somewhere...

Though I do know that thing about the Semetic being the first to assign only a sound to a symbol is correct, I did just read that somewhere -- it talked about how they took the symbol for "head," which was the word "resh," assigned it the "r" sound and called it "resh." But I could swear I read in the same article that the Greeks took the names/sounds for their alphabet from the Semetic

And Hebrew is in the Semetic language family, too.

But please, if you can prove me wrong on this (again), by all means go ahead, cause I'd rather learn than wrongly think I know something :)

Re: s'what I get for digging

[teaandbitchery.livejournal.com]

Oh, well, hmmm...apparently the Indo-European languages and the Semitic languages have different roots (they're language systems all together, apparently)...just as English is a branch of the Germanic languages (and not a Romance language, as Spanish is, for example). Not only that, apparently there are 12 other language families besides Indo-European and Semitic (or Afro-Asiatic, as it is now being called, apparently).

As for who did what first with sounds, I can't imagine that there is going to be a very clear answer about that, since it would seem that all of these language families have different roots, but they can cross influence each other (for example, apparently the Phoenicians are in the Afro-Asiatic group, but they influenced the Greek- and all other Western- alphabets).

So....*shrugs* Your guess is probably just as good as mine. I simply have a pet interest in this and an insane need to hunt down info on the web when confronted with a question. :)

Re: s'what I get for digging

[hotaruhime.livejournal.com]

I'm actually learning this stuff in school.. I'm taking graphic design, but we are studying the evolution of written language (typography!) and communication, so I thought I'd post what my textbook and professor say.

The Phoenicians sought a writing system for their Northern Semitic speech, and developed acrophonic symbols (pictoral symbols/hieroglyphs used to stand for the initial sound of the depicted object). The Phoenicians spread and took knowledge throughout the Mediterranean, since they were advanced in building ships and seafaring for their time. Their 22-letter alphabet was read right-to-left and evolved in Greece and Rome (one branch) and the branch you're interested in is Aramaic to Hebrew and Arabic. Hebrew and Arabic use the same 22 letters, if I'm not mistaken (maybe there were some stylistic differences), but they added some vowels and alternate ending-letters.

The Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet to fit their uses and changed the shapes, in favour of a geometric structure (all the letters are based on circles, squares, or equilateral triangles). The Greek alphabet is a predecessor to Etruscan, Latin (Roman) and Cyrillic alphabets.

This was like a study session for me LOL. Languages and linguistics really interest me. ^_^ Last year we had to learn an integral language in the evolution of type, so we got to learn a little bit about these languages and many others, and practice with similar instruments that they were written with.