Notice that the little marks - the dots and dashes and so on - appear mostly below the Hebrew letters. The 'pointed' text of the Deuteronomy passage would now look like this: Beside these vowel marks, the scribes also added 'cantillation' marks (in Hebrew, ta'amim) to indicate how the text was to be chanted or sung. Since these scribes did not want to alter the consonantal text, they placed these markings under, to the left, and above the Hebrew letters.

Sometime beginning around 600 A.D., a group of scribes in Tiberias called the Masoretes ( mesora means 'tradition') began developing a system of vowel marks (called neqqudot) to indicate how the text was traditionally read.

However, after the Diaspora more and more Jewish people began speaking the languages of their surrounding cultures -and literacy of the written Hebrew text became a more serious issue. In written Hebrew the string of letters might look like this:Īll of the letters in this string are Hebrew consonants you have learned-there is not a vowel in the bunch! In order to properly read this text, you, the reader, must supply the missing 'intonations' or vowels.Īdding vowel sounds to a string of letters was not too difficult as long as you were immersed in the oral tradition and regular usage of the day. If you were able to 'figure out' that the above string of letters reads 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart,' ( Deut 6:5), then you might be able to see how a language could be entirely made up of consonants-with the reader supplying the missing vowels. But ancient Hebrew contained no written vowels as distinct letter forms: the actual vowel sounds were 'added' to the reading by means of oral tradition and long-established usage.Īs an experiment, try reading the following: In fact, it is impossible to say anything at all without vowel sounds. This does not mean, of course, that vowels are not used in Hebrew. Unlike English, however, the Hebrew alphabet is a consonantal one: there are no separate letters for vowels in the written alphabet (though some letters, in particular Vav and Yod, can function as 'consonantal vowels').

You may recall from your early school days that the English alphabet includes the vowel letters 'A-E-I-O-U' (and sometimes 'Y').

What are the vowels in the alphabet