INITIAL TEACHING OF LITERACY IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES WITH DIFFERING ORTHOGRAPHIES

Israel: Hebrew and Arabic

Dennis Kurzon University of Haifa

FELA Initial Teaching in Europe, 3rd Symposium in Madrid 2017 Both Hebrew and Arabic are Semitic languages.

Both are written right to left, similar to Aramaic (or Syriac, used in the Church of the East or Nestorian Church). TYPES OF WRITING SYSTEM

Alphabetic: Latin (roman), Greek, Cyrillic Abjad: Arabic, Hebrew : , Amharic Featural: (Korean) Syllabaries (and morphological): Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese (Kanji) ARABIC

first four forms of Arabic writing system:

ا alif ب ج jim د dal

The Arabic abjad is made up of consonantal graphemes, but three of the graphemes may also indicate :

as :

;(Ɂ/ (glottal stop/ = <ء> alif with hamza on top /w/ = <و> waw // = < ي> ya

as vowels:

alif = /a/, waw = /u/, ya = /i/ Most of the graphemes have more than one form depending on their position in a word. The maximum number of forms is four. For example, the graphemes of the term abjad:

ا ـا a

ب بـ ـبـ ـب b

ج جـ ـجـ ـج j

د ـد d Differences between spoken Arabic – the Arabic that the children come to school with, and written Arabic (fusħa) – almost a foreign language.

Written literary / classical Arabic is understood all over the Arabic-reading world.

There are many Arabic dialects, many of which are mutually incomprehensible among Arabic speakers. Modern Standard Arabic: /hunaːk/

Kuwait & Iraq: /aku/ Tunisia: /famːa/ Morocco and Algeria: /kajn/ Yemen: /peh/ Egypt, the Levant, and most of the Arabian peninsula /fiː/ are "distinguishing marks attached to letters of the alphabet“ (Wells 2006)

“diacritics are not used to indicate some phonological feature, but to ensure a contrast between two or more graphemes that have the same basic shape“ (Kurzon 2008) So, what of dots above and below letters to distinguish consonants?

ب ت ث  ٮ بـ ـبـ تـ ـتـ ثـ ثـ

:”ya“ ي initial and medial forms of يـ ـيـ نـ ـن first four forms of Arabic writing system:

ا alif ب ba ج jim د dal

َر ْسم ̶ rasm Arabic has 16 grapheme forms to indicate 29 graphemes.

Arabic has only a cursive form – in printing, too.

In print, graphemes are not separated from each other as in the Latin, Slavonic and the Hebrew writing systems.

سكة حديدية "sikat ħadidiya/ "railway/

س ك ة ح د ي د ي ة In standard written Arabic, there are three vowels: /a/, /i/, /u/, indicated in pedagogical, liturgical and poetic texts by a above or below the grapheme.

Consonants without a also have a diacritic to indicate ْ .qalb/ -- dog/ قل ب :absence of vowel -- the sukun Order of graphemes in textbook

ء Ɂ ب b ت t ث θ ا – ي j د d ر r س s م m ح ħ

HEBREW also an abjad.

It has 22 graphemes with 5 final graphemes: כ / ך ; מ / ם ; נ / ן ; פ / ף ; צ / ץ

Graphemes are written separately, not joined:

כלב כלב /kelev/ As in Arabic, diacritics are used to indicate vowels for purposes of learning to read, for liturgy and for poetry. But not for distinguishing graphemes, except:

/s/ שׂ ʃ/ or/ שׁ which may be written ש

Vowels (Nikkud) ְ Shva or Shewa

Shĕwa ְpronounced /ə/ or ø (similar to sukun in Arabic and in Indian languages.

Dagesh

takes the form of a dot placed inside a Hebrew grapheme. One function is to change one of three graphemes indicating

/p/ = פּ ;/f/ = פ .fricatives to plosives, e.g א - ב b ר r מ m ה h ק q ס s נ n ת t ח ħ ל l ד d ש ʃ ע ʕ

Daniels, P. (2006). On beyond alphabets. Written Language and Literacy, 9(1), 7–24. doi:10.1075/wll.9.1.03dan

Daniels, P. (2013). The Arabic writing system. In Jonathan Owens (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kurzon, D. (2008). A brief note on diacritics. Written Language and Literacy, 11(1), 90–94. doi:10.1075/wll.11.1.07kur

Wells, J. C. (2001). Orthographic diacritics and multilingual computing. Language Problems and Language Planning, 24(3), 249–272. doi:10.1075/lplp.24.3.04wel

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