Rishon Rishon

Reading Hebrew

The Hebrew alphabet consists of 22 consonants, vowels being indicated by “points” – diacritical marks that appear under or around the letters, when written. But usually, people don’t bother writing them at all. How then is Hebrew read, without vowels?

One answer that I often hear is that in Hebrew, vowels aren’t important. This is often corroborated with an example from English: ts nt vry hrd t ndrstnd nglsh thts nt wrttn wth vwls! The sentence would get even easier to read if English had a letter for a glottal stop, which in English, like Hebrew, begins every word that starts with a vowel, and if we used “y” and “w” to indicate “i”, “o” and “u” sounds.

The reason for this is that English words typically have a lot more consonants than vowels, and the chances of two different English words having the same sequence of consonants is low. When it does happen, the words can usually be distinguished by context. But for Hebrew, this is much less the case. Take a look at some Hebrew text, and you will see that the ratio of vowels to consonants is much higher. In fact, it is worse than that. In Hebrew morphology, one word can usually be changed into several others, just by changing the vowels!

How then can Hebrew be read without vowels? Part of the answer is that when Hebrew is written unpointed (without vowel diacritics), the letters “y” and “w” are inserted for “i”, “o”, and “u”. Also “h” is used at the end of a word to indicate “a” or “e”. This still leaves a high degree of vowel ambiguity. The real reason that the system works is that only two things are needed to uniquely identify a Hebrew word: root and pattern. You can always identify a word’s root because roots consist of consonants alone. And it turns out that the degree to which vowels are indicated is enough to disambiguate almost all patterns – the little ambiguity that remains can easily be determined by context, much the way English speakers disambiguate the words to, too, and two.

I was wondering about all this in relation to my last three posts on dyslexia. Does the Hebrew writing system make it easier or harder to read? A lot of people seem to have jumped to the conclusion that it’s harder. But look again at the list of potential problems. Hebrew is written phonetically, it’s just missing some (redundant) information – the information that is written is not misleading, as it sometimes is in English. On the other hand, leaving out redundant information results in words that are significantly shorter, facilitating whole-word recognition. In addition, the nature of the Hebrew language itself works to keep words short. Hebrew compounds are written as separate words, and there are no morphological processes that result in infinitely expanding words, as there are in English. In fact, every new Hebrew learner has had the experience of struggling to figure out a particularly opaque word just to discover that it's English. Today, when I read Hebrew, foreign loan words stick out like sore thumbs – they seem like long strings of random letters.