The Hebrew Alefbet

The Hebrew alefbet can be found in many different forms. Originally, the letters of the alefbet were probably pictograms, similar to the type of picture-writing used in ancient Egypt. By the onset of (recorded) history, they had already gained their function as genuine letters, however. The original script was probably common to the ancient Sabæans, Phœnicians, Aramæans and Hebrews. Each group developed its own style, the Phœnicians' script spawned the scripts of the ancient Etruscans and Greeks, whose alphabets were adapted over time into the Roman, Runic and Cyrillic alphabets. The Hebrew alphabet (or perhaps a variant of the Aramaic alphabet) was adapted to fit the needs of Armenian and Georgian. The origins of the many alphabets and syllabaries of the Indian subcontinent have even been traced back to these early Semitic alphabets.

In Hebrew, as in any written language, the written language takes many different forms, for which different letter styles are used. The letter style used in Torah scrolls is rarely used elsewhere. The style found in books and newspapers (called "square letters" or "book style"), based on the style found in Torah scrolls, is almost never seen in written documents. At the same time, the written form, which shows far more similarities to Phœnecian, Aramaic and Arabic scripts than to book style, is seldom seen on documents (except occasionally in letterheads and signatures).

In ancient times, there were many different manifestations of the Hebrew alefbet, used by various communities, or for different purposes. Most of these have not survived except as curiosities. One form, however, believed to have originated around the time of the great medieval sage Rash''i (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, of Troyes), and used by him extensively, has survived. Nowadays, regardless of its origin, it is called "Rashi script". It was originally a type of italics used, in Rash''i's case, to set apart his commentaries on the Talmud (especially) from the text of the Gemara.

The Hebrew alefbet, especially in ancient times, also served as a sort of rudimentary (by modern standards, at least) system of representing numbers, analogous to the schemes we know as "Roman Numerals", etc. A great deal of Jewish mysticism is derived from comparing the numerical equivalence of the letter values of various words. (This numerical equivalence of the letter values is called "gematriya", from the Greek "geômetria", from which English gets the word "geometry".)

Reviewing the table below, it quickly becomes apparent that Hebrew is a language without vowels. This is not exactly true, although the vowels in Hebrew are not represented by separate letters as they are in the Greek and Roman alphabets and their derivatives. While vowels are just as important in Hebrew in giving a word its true meaning, they are not nearly as fluid as in Indo-European languages (the family of languages into which fall the vast majority of the languages of Europe and a great number of the languages of Asia, especially from Iran to eastern India). Indo-European word-roots consist of both consonants and specific vowels (which can change within the word according to other factors in the word itself, but not because those changes carry meaning in and of themselves). Hebrew is a Hamito-Semitic language (the family of languages which includes most of the languages of the northern 1/3 of Africa, as well as the languages of southwest Asia (not including Turkish, an Altaic language, or Kurdish, an Indo-European language), including the Berber languages, Coptic, Arabic, South Arabian, and the various forms of Aramaic, etc.) In Hamito-Semitic languages, a word-root consists entirely of consonants. Vowels are added according to rigid rules in order to give the root its specific nuance. This same function is performed in English and other Indo-European languages by the use of different suffixes for verb tenses and moods, or for variations in noun forms, etc.

To represent vowels, instead of using separate letters, Hebrew has a set of symbols, "dots and dashes" basically, called "nikudot". These are placed (for the most part) below the appropriate letters to indicate the correct vowels. Invented by the Masoretes in order to preserve the proper pronunciation of Hebrew millenia ago, nikudot are seldom seen outside children's classrooms. The most notable exception to that "rule" is in prayerbooks, Bibles, etc., and in newspapers or newsletters printed for people whose Hebrew proficiency is "notably less than native".