Hebrew Speakers/readers Can You Explain These Differences In Spelling

If you're a female Hebrew speaker, when you see in writing a form referring to you that could be either masculine or feminine (like a verb in -ת or a possessive in -ך), do you vowelize, either aloud or in your mind, as a masculine or feminine form?

Good question—because it raises an important attribute about the Hebrew script, namely, the advantage of ambiguity of unpointed text (in contrast to fully vowellised text, as in European languages).For example, when a new client approaches me about doing some translation or editing for them, I write to them:–כמה דברים לידיעתך: א) אם לא ציינת זאת כבר, אזדקק לפרטים הבאים ממך:(‘A few things for your information: a) If you haven’t stated this as yet, I shall need the following details from you’)This can be read equally by male or female readers, but is pronounced differently in each case. Female readers would read it:Kamah dvarim lidi’atekh: a) im lo tziant zot kvar, izdaqeq lapratim habaim mimekhwhile a male reader would read it:Kamah dvarim lidi’atkha: a) im lo tzianta zot kvar, izdaqeq lapratim habaim mimkhaSame spelling—different pronunciation, automatically determined by the reader’s gender.There are plenty of other examples of ambiguous spelling of Hebrew words, which are given to various pronunciations, but have nothing to do with gender, e.g.:דו”ח (duaḥ/doḥ)משתלה (mishtalah / mashtelah)לכל מאן דבעי (lekhol man div’ei / lekhol man dva’ei)שופרסל (Shuper-sal / Shufra-sal)תפאורה (taf’orah / tif’orah)This aspect of Hebrew writing is totally lost, however, in transcription methods that insist on inserting explicit vowels where they don’t exist in the original Hebrew. Which is one reason why SimHebrew was invented.

Why does Hebrew have multiple spellings for the same word?

It’s a little bit ambiguous what you are referring to… for example, whether you are talking about multiple spellings in Hebrew or multiple spellings of Hebrew words when transliterated into English….Multiple spellings within Hebrew, itselfAn example of this is my middle name which can be spelled אהרן or אהרון — that is, with or without the letter vav (ו). The reason for the multiple spellings is that, in formal/biblical Hebrew, the vowels are expressed as symbols under the letters. When writing cursive, it takes to long to make these vowel markings, and so they tend to just get dropped. To not fully omit the vowel sound, however, it is common when dropping the vowel symbols to insert letters that simulate the vowel sounds (like vav for an “oh” or “ooh” sound and yud for “ee”, “yeh”, “yuh”, “yoo” kinds of sounds). However, it is optional whether to insert this additional letter to add back the vowel sound (you can also spell it the traditional way with the various vowel marks fully omitted).Multiple spellings in EnglishWhen transliterating Hebrew, there are is no one right way to do it. The International Phoenetic Alphabet (IPA) provides a way to reproduce sounds accurately and transliterate consistently, but it is somewhat inaccessible for anyone other than expert linguists. Various Jewish institutions and publishers have come up with their own styles / guidelines for such transliterations, so there is some consistency and some small number of more common transliterations. However, no transliteration is perfect; many of the transliterations that are commonly used work well in terms of allowing members of the Jewish community who are illiterate in Hebrew to correctly read the word (assuming that they already know what the Hebrew word is and are in a community that can help them to pronounce it correctly), but most of these transliterations are not well-suited to conveying the correct pronunciation to non-Jews who are not familiar with the words. For example, in Hannukah, do you pronounce the first syllable like in “happy” or like in “humble” (the correct answer is closer to the latter, but also involves a guttural sound for the “h”, like you are trying to clear out the back of your throat). This is why, in answering Quora questions, my own transliterations tend to be very different than what is in more common usage by the rest of the Jewish community (I would typically transliterate this as “khuh-noo-kuh” to better capture the intended pronunciation).

Does the Hebrew language really have no vowels?

First, it’s not the Hebrew spoken language that has no vowels. Second, it’s not the Hebrew written language or alphabet that has no vowels, either.Hebrew, Arabic, and other Abjad writing systems used for several Semitic languages use a root structure. In Hebrew, a root (such as שׁמר‎/ShMR) could be re-used for various verb conjugations and other grammatical forms (שׁוֹמֵר/shomer, “guard” as noun or “guards” as verb; לִשְׁמֹר/lishmor, “to guard;” לְהִשְׁתַּמֵּר/lhishtamer, “to be preserved;” etc.). A given root may have as many as 7 verb forms (active simple, intensive, and causative; reflexive; and passive causative, intensive, and simple, or pa’al, pi’el, hif’il, hitpa’el, huf’al, pu’al, nif’al). Since these patterns can generally be relied upon for comprehension of the specific confugation, tense, gender, etc., certain verbs like a voiced or voiceless “e” are not written with their own vowel, and in fact, no discrete letter for “e” exists. The diacritics seen around the letters above, called niqud, do not generally appear in newspapers, TV subtitles, etc. Additionally, since the root form is well known, certain spellings may arbitrarily use the discrete letter וֹ for “o”, or may present the niqud for “o” as an assignation to another letter.The Abjad system worked reasonably well with Hebrew words, but doesn’t work well at all with foreign loan words that don’t match Hebrew root structure. If a loan word has an “e” in it (such as “cellular”), its pronunciation won’t be properly socialized by the press. Additionally, Hebrew lacks discrete letters for “ch” in “Charlie” and “j” in “Jack,” while also lacking any way to write the phonemic value for “th” in “Thanks.” The same limitations broadly apply to Arabic. By contrast, the Latin script allows us to add diacritics to existing letters when needed, without ‘hiding’ the phonemic values from print, since using niqud is relatively burdensome. And as with Chinese, once you convert the name of some obscure African leader into Hebrew writing, you can’t reliably de-garble it back to its actual phonetic values.So what the Hebrew writing system truly lacks isn’t vowels per se, but forethought.

Which is easier to learn to read: Hebrew or Arabic?

0:00-4:14My system one answers: Hebrew, but let’s allow system two justify this position.Why both languages are hard (for a speaker of a language that uses a Latin alphabet):The letters look differentBoth are (broken) abjads, that is they don’t write out all the vowels, only the long ones, so called consonant vowels which can also be read as constants. Already confusing, right?Their letters have different forms depending on the position in the sentence.Why Hebrew is easier:In Hebrew only a few characters have more than one form— those are mem, nun, kaph, pe, tsadi. In Arabic all letters have at least two different forms and most have four!Less new phonemes. Arabic, specially Modern Standard (MSA) has several sounds unfamiliar to speakers of European languages — different varieties of letters “d”,”t”, “h”, and “s”. In contrast, Hebrew only a few new sounds, represented by letters het, ayin, resh, and aleph.Written Hebrew (almost) = Spoken Hebrew. Arabic exists in many varieties and dialects, and the language that’s commonly used to write is Modern Standard Arabic, an official, more literary version of Arabic. People rarely use local dialects in writing, if so they’d often use Latin letters for that purpose. In Hebrew, the spoken colloquial language is commonly written down. So, rather than having to translate between official written form to colloquial spoken dialectal form in Arabic, you can just read what is written.For the learning task itself you all need to consider the availability of study materials.Even though different varieties of Arabic are spoken in many geographical locations, the availability of training materials isn’t so wide. Especially if we talks about spoken languages!In contrast, because Israel has a long history of catering to new Immigrants, the country has an infrastructure of supporting their Hebrew studies. This translates into a variety of materials in "easy Hebrew”: radio & tv programs, as well as newspapers. You will not have to resort to children’s books or invented textbook stories to practice reading, but you will have access to materials about current affairs or topics that interest you. A rare treat for adult language learners.