As I understand it, ancient Hebrew was written without the vowel sounds. So, to use a modern English analogy, if you ran across “ht” in a text, you would have to guess from the context what was meant: hit, hat, hut, hoot, heat, etc. Why would any people devise a language like this? Are there any good reasons for so doing?
Sure. Apparently for some languages, the context will tell you what the word is. AFAIK, Hebrew has-triliteral roots (as Arabic does) and thus there really isn’t all that much need to have vowels written in. For some texts, though, there are vowel annotations.
Since English doesn’t have the same root system as Hebrew, the example you give serves to show what an English word looks like without a vowel but doesn’t really show you how it works. Try this example instead:
It’s much clearer what’s missing, isn’t it?
There are quite a few different approaches to writing a language. Check out the categories in the Omniglot.
The meanings of Hebrew words (and several other Semitic languages’ words) are based on the root meanings of consonant sets, usually three to a root but that varies. Say ChRB is your root. ChaRiB might have one meaning, CheRuB another, ChoRaBai yet another, all related to a base meaning of “burn” (before being baby angels, cherubim were angelic figures characterized by flame). To give an English parallel, consider the related meanings of sheen, shine(n), shine (v), shone, shining, etc. All related in meaning yet all somewhat different words.
The alphabet derived from apparent cuneiform pictographs, where “beth” was a house, “aleph” a head of cattle, etc. As it moved to alphabetic use, it was a form of shorthand, each letter representing a consonant sound associated with the pictograph it was derived from. (That includes our own; ours derived ultimately from the related Phoenician alphabet, through a complex series of modifications.) Think of a child’s alphabet book: A is for apple, B is for ball, etc. Now imagine that the letters are actually stylized apples, balls, and so on.
As to how effective it was as a shorthand, it shd b vdnt tht U cn qckly rd A cnsnntl scrpt. (Notice the special characters, represented by uppercase, for short words that were vowel-only. Hebrew had two of these.)
It’s way too long and detailed to say anything about here, but the chapter on Semitic languages in The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention, by Guy Deutscher is brilliant. It shows how those languages are constructed and how they evolved. He also puts it in the larger context of how other types of languages evolved. Highly recommended, but you do have to put in some work and pay attention. He makes it as simple as possible but there are inherently a lot of details to go through.
To give a one sentence summary, if pressed, Semitic languages are constructed around three letter roots. The various tenses and shades of meanings of related words are created by building on the roots in regular ways.
On preview, I see Poly has already given an explanation so I won’t go on.
I belive Hebrew has a few two-letter root words. I’ll have to check.
Polycarp, what are the vowel-only words? I don’t remember coming across them.
I assume that means more vowel-like letters than words per se - a vav or yud can sometimes be a consonant sound, and sometimes represent a placeholder for a vowel. The closest example in English is the letter Y, which is sometimes a consonant (like in yo-yo) and sometimes a vowel (like in very). In unvowellized Hebrew, the placement of vavs and yuds can tell you where there are oo, oh, and ee sounds. The vav and yud aren’t pronounced - they’re stuck in there for grammatical reasons to show you what the pronunciation would be, and would be carrying the vowels (the cholam, chirik, and um, the oo in the vav one (you memorize the names for these things in kindergarten or first grade, and then they don’t come up again much - I think it’s the shuruk; I can read and write Hebrew, really!)) if you were writing out the vowel symbols. In unvowellized Hebrew, you’ll sometimes write out extra vavs and yuds that you wouldn’t bother with if you were writing out the vowel symbols, as guides to pronunciation.
It’s pretty easy to read. Contemporary Hebrew doesn’t use vowel marks either, except in ambiguous contexts, poetry, and the like.
It should be noted that there are two letters in Hebrew (aleph and ayin) that represent vowels, and do not have a consonantal (is that a word?) sound. And there is a letter Y which is a sort-of vowel. Using three-letter root words, the ancient language was fairly complete. They didn’t need the complexities of modern languages; modern Hebrew, for instance, has had to add new words (“telephone”) that don’t just have three-letter roots.
My speculation, I’ve not read the Deutscher book (but it’s now on my list): the languages were initially written by being carved on tablets. It wasn’t a means of communication in and of itself, but a means of recording verbal commmunications (stories, royal edicts, etc) So if there was some small ambiguities about verb tense, say, that didn’t matter so much. Think of the writing as being like shorthand.
Sorry, that statement of mine was unintentionally but distinctly misleading. What I intended it to say was, “There are two Hebrew letters that are [placeholders for] vowel-only syllables.” But with it referencing U for “you” and A for the indefinite article in English, I see where I dragged a red gefillteherring through the thread! :o (Three, actually, given vav’s special second use.) Dex did a really nice job on clarifying what it was that I intended to say.
In addition to the vav, yud, aleph, and (rarely) ayin, which are mentioned above a partial vowels, there is also the heh which has an “H” sound at a consonant, but very often appears at the end of a word to signify a “-ah” sound, or at the beginning of a word for a “ha-” sound.
Hebrew’s lack of true vowels is often demonstrated by spelling “AMERICA” as “MRC”, but this is a fallacy. “America” is spelled in modern Hebrew with six letters: aleph, mem, resh, yud, kuf, heh, which can be tranliterated as either “AMRYKA” or “AMRICA”. Yes, the missing “E” must be supplied by familiarity with the word, but still, the alleged lack of vowels is an exaggeration.
[QUOTE=Polycarp]
The meanings of Hebrew words (and several other Semitic languages’ words) are based on the root meanings of consonant sets, usually three to a root but that varies. Say ChRB is your root. ChaRiB might have one meaning, CheRuB another, ChoRaBai yet another, all related to a base meaning of “burn” (before being baby angels, cherubim were angelic figures characterized by flame). To give an English parallel, consider the related meanings of sheen, shine(n), shine (v), shone, shining, etc. All related in meaning yet all somewhat different words.
O.K., I’m really trying to understand this, so please be patient with me. If I understand you correctly, if I am reading along in a Hebrew text and I come across ChRB, it could mean ChaRiB, CheRuB, ChoRaBai. and perhaps some other things. Will it always be clear from the context which it is? To take you English example, if I say “I like the shn on that car”, would you think I meant “shine” or that I meant “sheen”? (Even accepting the idea that Hebrew was developed as a sort of shorthand, I can’t understand anyone deciding to leave out the vowels. Perhaps it’s just a different mindset.)
I was under the impression that Hebrew doesn’t have the indefinite articles “a” or “an”, and uses “the” as a definite article.
Polycarp, why are you making gefilte out of herring??? Even if the gefilte is red.
On the point of unvocalized consonants, a few weeks ago I finally learned that the word “perhaps” is shin-mem-aleph. This is vital to contrast with “listen,” shin-mem-ayin. You really don’t want to get the two confused in prayer.
Hebrew was developed as an alphabetic language to replace a symbolic language, which makes the language MUCH easier to learn (and if necessary to crack). Greek added the improvement of promoting vowels to full letters.
The issue arises when you write the word out; when speaking it, you’d use the intended vowels. But the difficulty is still there in writing – the context may not say whether SHN should be pronounced “sheen” or “shine”. This does cause translation problems.
שמע shəma‘ - ‘listen’
שמא shemā’ - ‘perhaps’
The difference in pronunciation between ‘ and ’ is now lost, since both have become zero (not pronounced). The distinction between long and short vowels has been lost too. The only difference between the two words in Modern Hebrew would be the shwa in ‘listen’ vs. the vowel /e/ in ‘perhaps’. The dictionary says that shemā’ is a literary word for ‘perhaps’, it isn’t used in conversation, so its pronunciation matters less. If you look up “perhaps” English to Hebrew, shemā’ isn’t listed; instead it gives ula or yitakhen.
The only word I can think of that consists of a single vowel is the conjunction ve spelled with the letter vav, which is pronounced “u” in certain sandhi environments. That sounds as if the pronunciation changes when you go to the beach or the desert. “Sandhi” is a word used by linguists, referring to sound changes at word boundaries. It comes from Sanskrit roots meaning ‘put together’ and is a cognate of Greek synthesis.
Except that ‘ayin was a consonant in the ancient language. It still is in some Sephardic dialects. In Yemenite Hebrew, I think. I wonder how long after ‘aliyah it takes the dialects to die out?
Don’t forget the vowell stresses. “Listen (imperative)” is pronounced “SHMA”. “Perhaps” (a better translation would be “perchance*”) is pronounced “SHEH-mah.”
*IMHO:
Ulai - Maybe.
Yitachen - Perhaps.
Shema - Perchance.
It’s a matter of degree.
Note also that, as implied in Poly’s and EM’s posts, it wasn’t the Hebrews themselves who originally thought up this sort of system. Earlier Semitic languages were also represented by alphabetic scripts derived from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet.
While this kind of abjad or incomplete-alphabetic system that explicitly represents consonants but not vowels may seem like an illogical invention, it had some definite advantages over earlier script forms. Cuneiform scripts, for example, were syllabic, with one (or more) glyphs for each different syllable. So writing similar syllables like “ga”, “gu”, “gi”, etc. wasn’t just a matter of changing one vowel-letter, it required a whole different sign for each separate syllable. Memorizing just twenty-odd symbols for writing consonants would be a lot easier than memorizing a few hundred!
(Not suggesting, btw, that the earliest Semitic alphabets were deliberately devised to avoid the cumbersomeness of syllabic scripts. Syllabic scripts such a cuneiform might not even have been known to the early alphabet-users, who seem to have been influenced by Egyptian consonantal glyphs.)
I think you mean “writing system” rather than “language”. The OP makes a similar conflation.
Why would any people devise a language where “bass” and “base” are sometimes pronounced the same, but sometimes not, and each spelling can represent several words with distinct meanings?
It’s important to remember that the Semitic writing system was not “devised” per se; like all other written languages it evolved from more primitive symbols. It isn’t as if any one person or committee simply sat down and said, “Let us invent a way to write things down, where individual symbols will stand for individual sounds.” It came about as a slow process, from idea-symbols very gradually being adapted, eroded and built into an alphabet, and even more slowly evolving syntactical and grammatical structures. One influence may well have been the fact that fewer symbols to be written (particularly in a time when “writing” was very manually laborious) made the writing of information go faster, with less labor.
(I’ll second the recommendation of the Deutscher book made by Exapno. The book is a fascinating and well-written introduction to the history of language.)
if OP is looking for a simple answer, without delving into linguistic theory, look at it this way:
The rules of Hebrew grammar are rigid. Between every 2 consonants, you must insert a vowel. The vowel which you insert is determined by permanent rules, so that you don’t even need to write the vowel down–any native speaker of the language knows which vowel to pronounce between the 2 consonants.
Simple examples:
in one class of verbs, every present-tense verb is written with 3 letters (consonants), but always has two vowels inserted between them to make a 5 letter word.
KTV is always pronounced k-O-t-A-v – “He writes”
NTN is always pronounced n-O-t-A-n – “He gives”
to make these verbs past tense, you just change the vowels, to an A and another A
KTV is always pronounced k-A-t-A-v — “He wrote”
NTN is always pronounced n-A-t-A-n —“He gave”
The rules are easy to learn, very rigid (almost no exceptions to confuse you) and once you know them, you start to wonder why anybody ever invented vowels.
One problem is that you have to decide whether the sentence is written in present tense or past tense before you can read it. But once you know that (from the context of ther rest of the sentence), it is impossible to mis-pronounce the word.
It’s a little like these sentences in English: “I read the newspaper yesterday”
“I read the newspaper every day”
You don’t know whether to pronounce “Read” as “reed” or as “red” until you see the next 3 words. That happens a lot in Hebrew.
But once you know the context, the pronunciation of the vowels is obvious, and they don’t need to be written down. (this was probably very convenient back in an age when writing involved using a hammer and chisle on stone.) 
I learned those verb forms with e as the second vowel: kotev, noten. And they don’t specifically have “he” as the subject. The same form would work for any masculine singular subject. Likewise, kotevet means not only ‘she writes’ but could also mean 'I write" or ‘you write’ anytime the subject is feminine singular. To tell who you’re talking about, you have to specify the pronoun.
The reason this form works differently is that it isn’t actually a verb conjugation, it’s the active participle, and the verb “to be” is implied. So literally ani kotevet means ‘I am someone who writes’, but in Modern Hebrew it’s used to mean ‘I write’. In Ancient Hebrew they had an actual conjugation for the present tense, but in Modern Hebrew this is taken to be the future. Strictly speaking, Semitic verbs don’t really have tenses. They conjugate for the perfective and imperfective aspects. The perfective corresponds pretty well with the past tense and the imperfective with the present or future, though. So we English speakers get into the lazy habit of talking about Semitic verbs as though they have tenses. Near enough.
But note this difference. Verb conjugations also express person and number. So the verb katav is always masculine singular third person, and the subject "he’ is implied. While katavah expresses feminine singular third person, and by itself means ‘she wrote’, and katavti means ‘I wrote’, katavnu ‘we wrote’, etc. But in the present if you just say kotev, that doesn’t tell you who is writing, because it isn’t a conjugation. Grammatically, it functions as an adjective.
The o in the first syllable of verbs in the present is sometimes shown only with a little dot in the upper left corner (holam haser - ‘defective o’), and then the spelling is identical with the past tense, as you said. But more often, I think, the vowel is written with the letter vav and this is called holam male’ (‘full o’).
The letters heh, yod,, and vav, when used to show long vowels this way, are called matres lectionis ‘mothers of reading’. In Modern Hebrew it’s become conventional to use them to write out vowels in full as much as possible when transliterating non-Hebrew names. When the letter vav is used for the vowel, it effectively distinguishes past verbs from the present construction at a glance.
Question: I learned the name of the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet as yod. I missed when they decided to rename it “yud”?