Introducing the Hebrew letters

There are many things to the Hebrew language that are very foreign to an English reader. Most people start with the letters. That’s fine. Some of them make a sound and some sometimes don’t. So it is in English – remember the silent ‘e’. When we began to learn writing, we also started with the alphabet, but we knew our own language long before we were taught to connect the sounds to the letters. I remember my first real attempts to learn Hebrew. It was not many years ago. I would pick up a page of text and struggle to see its orientation, often seeing it as upside down.

There are 22 letters in the Hebrew alef-bet. All 22 letters are consonants. Eleven of them also have a grammatical function. There are letters in English that have a grammatical function: like ‘s’ for plurals and ‘ing’ for a verbal form, and ‘re’ for a prefix, and ‘ness’ and ‘ion’, suffixes for creating nouns from verbs. But we don’t think of many individual letters as having grammatical usage. The Hebrew language makes extensive use of prefixes and suffixes, so whenever I found myself looking for a word in a lexicon, I often couldn’t find it because I did not know how to separate the prefixes from the root. The first letters of a word are often grammatical and therefore not part of the root word that would be listed in the lexicon.

This lesson is brought to you by the letter vav, the sixth letter of the Hebrew alef-bet. It is itself the word for a hook. Vav is also a letter that is extensively used in several grammatical roles. It is a very frequent part of the Hebrew soundscape. One of its main roles is to connect Hebrew words within a sentence and between sentences. For instance, it is the first letter of 51,001 words in the Hebrew Bible. That is about 1 in 6 of all the words of the canon (by my count). Yet there is only one Hebrew root word or stem that begins with vav and that is vav itself. All other words in the lexicon beginning with v are foreign to Hebrew. They are proper names or borrowed from other languages.

There! If you have started from nothing, you now know one Biblical Hebrew root word: vav is a hook. It frequently occurs as the first letter of a lexical word, because like our conjunctions ‘and’ and ‘or’ its role in Hebrew is to hook words together, just like the hooks connected the curtain of the temple onto the pillars. Vav even looks like a hook (ו), but in some fonts the hook disappears and it is simply a full line height vertical bar.

Vav, unsurprisingly, sounds like v. So as a child, you might well have heard the sound frequently, and you would eventually know that it made sentences, even before you knew what a sentence was. Here is one of the 13 places – all in Exodus, where the word vav is used. See if you can find it.

Exodus 26:32

The other thing I remember about learning to manage Hebrew is that every English or French or German book I looked at had a different scheme for transliteration. It was very frustrating. It is also unavoidable. For the lyrics of the music, the singer needs some help, so I have used anglicized vowels and digraphs as needed. It’s an imperfect scheme, but at least, the program that produces the score is consistent.

Let’s take apart a word or two from this verse of Exodus 26 on the building of the tabernacle. It is almost a ‘given’ that you would have heard the first word from your mother many times. If I use a transliteration that is reversible, that first word is vntt.

This transcription into SimHebrew accurately simulates the Hebrew square text in its full spelling. Sometimes SimHebrew expressly includes vowels, but not in this case. The hearer is just supposed to know the vowels. It’s as if one adds a sound between two consecutive consonants to make the language heard. You might notice that over half the syllables in this verse carry an ‘a’ vowel. They are all short and may almost be so short as to be a schwa, like the second ‘o’ in octopus.

The first word vntt is from the root ntn, usually rendered as give. It is one of the most difficult roots to find in a lexicon from the word because the n (nun) is a weak letter. Both the first and last letter of this root disappear in some word forms. In this verse I rendered it as position. Here is the text with the Hebrew score (the accents over and under the text). The middle column between the two Hebrew versions is a syllable count.

32 And you will position it onto the four pillars of acacia overlaid with gold, their hooks gold, on four sockets of silver.
לב ונתת֣ה את֗ה על־ארבעה֙ עמוד֣י שט֔ים מצפ֣ים זה֔ב וויה֖ם זה֑ב על־ארבע֖ה אדני־כֽסף	25 7		lb vntt aoth yl-arbyh ymudi wiTim mxupim zhb vvihm zhb yl-arbyh adni-csf

Did you find the hook (vav) in the music and in the lyrics? Look at the SimHebrew for the whole verse. Do you see two consecutive v’s in the text?

You can learn to read SimHebrew. It helps you to see and hear the structure and wordplay of the Hebrew, but it has no musical marks in it. SimHebrew is a left to right notation. Square Hebrew is right to left. So if you are tracing the mapping of letters in a word, draw arrows from each SimHebrew letter to its corresponding letter in the square Hebrew if that helps you see. There is a full list of the letters below for reference.

Most of us struggling Hebrew students eventually learn to puzzle out the vowel markers in the square text that the tradition invented in the first millennium of the Common Era to preserve the sounds that would otherwise have been lost. These various dots and dashes appear above and below the consonants. In the case of the two words we examined above, the first has repetitive short ‘a’ vowels, venatatah, and the second has three different vowels, vaveihem. The suffix ihem signifies the plural of hooks and the pronoun ‘their’.

But my work is about the musical score embedded in the text. No one knows when that was invented. It appears fully formed for the first time in the Aleppo Codex. These signs are music, a system of hand-signals, and they allow interpretation for the ear of things that writing for the eye cannot achieve.

Here is the full list of letters for reference:

1. Alef, a, א is a guttural. Think of it as a glottal stop (as in English) but it can carry one of many vowel sounds with it. So the /a/ of ab, father, carries an a. But the /a/ of abn, stone, carries an /e/ so is pronounced ebn (as in Ebenezer). This is not different from English. For example, note that the English any begins with an 'e' sound. The word אמת (amt) comprised of the first and last letters and the 13th has either a or e associated with its initial, but the two are very close and always heading towards schwa. E.g. amito, his truth, sounds like it is written, but amt, truth, sounds like the Lego hero, Emmet.
2. Bet, b, ב sounds as b or v.
3. Gimel, g, ג is g.
4. Dalet, d, ד is d.
5. He (heh), h, ה is the lighter aspirate, but it counts as a guttural too. /a/ and /h/ both have significant grammatical roles.
6. Vav, v, ו is the connector and appears in SimHebrew as /u/ /o/ or /v/. SimHebrew tells you the vowel explicitly for this letter if it applies. /v/ is part of the grammatical team.
7. Zayin, z, ז is z.
8. Ket, k, ח is ch, the serious aspirate, much like ch in loch.
9. Tet, T, ט is pronounced as t. It is a minor player on the grammatical team, occasionally moving in a word as the verb form changes.
10. Iod, i, י is i. It may operate like a consonant (as does the English /y/, for example, in the name Iago) as well as a vowel.
11. Caf, c, כ is a hard c with a little h in it as well. /ç/ is used for a final caf. Final caf is a presentation issue only.
12. Lamed (two syllables), l, ל is l.
13. Mem, m, מ is m.
14. Nun, n, נ is n. /i/, /c/, /l/, /m/, /n/ all play grammatical roles.
15. Samekh, s, ס is s. It may look like an /o/ and be difficult to distinguish from an /m/ sofit. This is not a problem in SimHebrew. Samekh, smç, support or sustain, comes in the place of /o/ in the Latin alphabet. There must be a story here.
16. Ayin, y, ע is the heavier-duty guttural - sort of like an emphasized 'excellent' in English. And like alef, it may take more than one different vowel. For example viyl, so let him go up, is the connector vav, va, followed by the prefix /i/ behaving like a consonant y and the guttural /y/ carrying an ah sound, all together phonetically vaya`al. And yolm, everlasting, eras past, etc, is /y/ glottal stop carrying an o sound, `olam.
17. Peh, p, פ sounds like /p/, or /f/ if it is the last letter of a word.
18. Xade, x, צ is ts.
19. Qof, q, ק is q.
20. Resh, r, ר is r.
21. Shin / sin, שׁ is w, pronounced sh or s (and you just have to know). /w/ is a minor player on the grammatical team, the prefix /sh/.
22. Taf t ת is t. /t/ is a grammatical letter.

A brief note on finding the root of the word: These 16 strong letters rarely disappear in word forms: b, g, d, z, T, k, c, l, s, y, p, x, q, r, w, t. These 6 weak letters often disappear in some word forms a, h, v, i, m, n. In particular, on the insides of word forms, v and i often morph into each other.