Is Hebrew read from right to left? If so, why?
Don’t listen to the nay-sayers. There is a why.In ancient Mesopotamia, where the ancestors of Hebrew developed, the method of writing was mainly chisel and clay or stone. Your weak hand holds the stick, your strong hand gently hits against its side with another tool. If, like most humans, you are right-handed, this means right-to-left is the natural progression.By the time Greek and Latin scripts formed, the main method was quill-writing, on paper or papyrus or hides. You hold the quill in your strong hand, which you do not want to be smeared with ink. So you write away from the existing text. If, like most humans, you are right-handed, this means left-to-right is the natural progression.
How do you read Hebrew without vowel marks?
It takes time, I have been learning hebrew for 10 yrs, and for maybe the first 6 or 7 they told us we must write vowels under the words all of the books we read from had vowels. But once we built up a sufficient vocabulary, and we had a better understanding of the structure of the Hebrew language, it is very easy, in fact, probably easier without vowels. If you want to read without vowels, I say, keep on practicing with vowels, build up your vocabulary, and gradually get books/workbooks that don't have vowels and slowly start to use them. Before you know it, you will be reading and writing hebrew like a pro, like an Israeli!
Why can Hebrew be read without written vowels?
Modern HebrewI took Modern Hebrew for a year in college, during which time I also visited Israel for 10 days. By no means did I reach a high level of proficiency, but I rarely had difficulty pronouncing the right vowels after 2-3 months of study.Others have mentioned all of these mechanisms, but to summarize succinctly:Vowels are indicated, in Modern Hebrew, in writing, in almost all words by the mechanism of matres lectionis -- consonant letter "stand-in" for vowels. This is quite consistently used for the /o/, /u/, and /i/ vowels, and also for /a/ and /e/ and other vowel sounds in borrowed foreign words.There are some cases of words with irregular or missing matres lectionis in their spelling, but they are all very common short words, or even just prefixes and suffixes. For example, לא (/lo/, "no") is not written with a ו as a mater lectionis to indicate the /o/ vowel, but it's such a common word that you learn to recognize it consistently.Hebrew verbs are based on consonantal roots; the vowels are usually predictable if you know the person and tense of the verb from the surrounding context (and again, the exceptions are only in very very common verbs). Amir E. Aharoni's answer has a lot more detail on this.Children's books and language-learning materials usually feature explicit Niqqud (vowels marked by dots and lines around the consonants) to make the vowels unambiguous.Biblical and liturgical HebrewThis is more difficult: the grammar is different and in many ways more complex, there are lots of unfamiliar words, the spelling is more irregular, and to top it off some religious texts written in the Hebrew alphabet are actually in the related-but-distinct Aramaic language. The ancient Masoretes recognized the difficulty of pronouncing Hebrew correctly given only the consonant letters, which is a religiously important matter when reading sacred texts, and came up with the Niqqud vowel system which is still used in Modern Hebrew.At least in North America, prayer books and Tanakhs (copies of the complete Old Testament in Hebrew) are almost always "fully pointed" with Niqqud vowel marks in all Hebrew text.Pretty much the only case where I've ever had to read Biblical Hebrew text without Niqqud is when reading directly from the Sefer Torah (books of Moses written on a parchment scroll) in synagogue. The only solution here is to practice and memorize the text carefully ahead of time.
Does Hebrew writing from the right to left affect numbers? Is 2240 written and read as 0422?
There’s a Hebrew numbering system that uses Hebrew Letters and is written from right to left. It’s not positional. It’s more like the “Roman Numeral” system but with Hebrew letters. (Except there are discrete letters for each digit up to 10. There’s no zero).In modern Hebrew when writing numbers for business or science, the numbers are written using the positional numbering system used throughout the west and the numbers go from left to right, even in the middle of text that goes from right to left.
Does ancient Hebrew writing have punctuation like we have today?
No, neither ancient Hebrew nor the Greek texts upon which the Bible are based had punctuation marks. Interpreters have to make their best educated guesses about how to add punctuation when they translate those texts into English. In addition to that, Hebrew words often have no vowels. Later on a system developed to add "pronunciation" marks to the Hebrew letters but those came about after the books in the Bible were originally written.
How do I learn to read Hebrew faster without vowels?
I'm in the process of writing a book titled "Hebrew for the Interested" that is a phase in/phase out approach of English to Hebrew. It's based on the thesis that non Hebrew speakers are intimidated in their pursuit of Hebrew owing to hebrew not being written with vowels and that it is written from right to left. As such, the first phase of reading Hebrew follows a 6-step process:Considering the sentence:"Hebrew is written without vowels":1. Without vowels:Hbrw s wrttn wtht vwls2. Right to left (word for word)Vwls wtht wrttn s Hbrw 3. Right to left (letter for letter)Slwv thtw nttrw s wrbH4. Include Hebrew vowels5. Transliterateהיברו איס ווריטין וויטאיט וואיילס6.Substitute Hebrew for English עברית נכתב/ת ללא ניקוד
How do Israeli children learn to read Hebrew?
I’m not sure what is actually being asked: Israeli children learn how to read the way most children around the world are taught to read. In pre-school they are generally taught to recognize the print letters and the sounds they represent. In school they are taught how to put it all together to make words.In Hebrew, the letters are basically consonants. Vowels mainly come as signs below individual letters. Hebrew is a phonetic language, so children basically learn one sign at a time, and the sound it makes when combined with each of the letters. Once they grasp the principle with the first few signs, the remaining signs are taught quicker, adding the sign to several letters at a time.Most schools teach reading and writing with the print version of the alphabet and only later so the teach them cursive. Some schools, however, teach them to read print and to write cursive from day one.In Orthodox schools, mastering reading skills is celebrated with a “siddur party” in which the children sing/dance/put on a skit for parents and grandparents, at the end of which they receive their first full-fledged siddur (prayer book). There are abridged prayer books for preschool children with limited prayers and lots of pictures, but the one they get in first grade will be like the ones their parents use.