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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > August 1991

Hebrew for Bible Readers

Adding vowels

By Keith N. Schoville

As we noted in our first lesson (“Starting with Aleph,” BR 07:03), the Hebrew alphabet originally had no symbols for vowels. It was a form of shorthand, with signs only for consonants. In order to eliminate ambiguity in pronunciation, a secondary system of vowel notation was developed. The final form of the vowel notation system was perfected in the tenth century C.E. by scribes living in Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. They are known as the Masoretes, from the Hebrew word for “to hand over” (for more on the Masoretes, see Harvey Minkoff on the Aleppo Codex). In […]

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Endnotes

1.

Note that the kamats katan and the kamats look alike but have different pronunciations. Kamats has the short, “o” sound when it appears in a closed (consonant-vowel-consonant), unaccented syllable (as in, lK;). Otherwise it has the sound of “ah,” as in bt’K;.

2.

The Hebrew consonants yod [y] and vov [w] sound somewhat vowel-like even though they are technically consonants. (Similarly, in English the y in baby is a vowel, but in ye it is a consonant. And the w in way is a consonant, but in bow it is a vowel.) Yod and vov are sometimes joined with vowel signs and pronounced as a part of the vowel rather than as a consonant.

3.

Shuruk sounds like kubbuts, but shuruk is considered a long vowel because it is written with vov