The Hebrew Alef-Bet

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

The Hebrew Alef-Bet There are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet (alef-bet); five letters have two forms – one form if it appears at the beginning or middle of a word, and a different form when it is the final letter in the word. (Remember that Hebrew was originally written without any punctuation, vowels or even spaces between the words – these five letters would give some “signposts” through that text to periodically identify the end of a word. Even today, Israeli newspapers have no punctuation nor vowels, although they do separate the words). Therefore, there are 27 unique letters in the Hebrew alef-bet. Hebrew started as a picture language – the letters were pictures of the item or concept they stood for. For example, the second letter “bet” B was used to represent a house – and it looks like a lean-to dwelling. The 18th letter “tzaddi” c represents righteousness – and looks like a person kneeling in prayer. Because of the pictorial origins of the alef-bet, each of the 22 letters has a specific meaning as shown below: 1. Zx Alef - God is Creator & King 12. l Lamed - Teaching & Learning 2. B Bet -House or Temple 13. m Mem - Water, Revealed, Concealed 3. g Gimel –Loving Kindness, 14. n Nun - Faithfulness, Soul, Culmination Emergence, condemnation 4. d Dalet –Door, Path or Way 15. s Samech - Support, Divine Presence 5. h Hay –Spirit, Breath of God 16. f Ayin - Sight, Insight 6. V Vav –Completion, Redemption 17. P Peh - Mouth, Speech 7. z Zayin –Focal point of Sustenance, 18. c Tzaddi - Righteousness & Humility Struggle 8. H Chet –Transcendence, Life, Grace 19. q Qoph - Holiness, Growth Cycles 9. F Tet –Serpent, Objective Good 20. r Resh - Wicked, Wickedness 10. y Yod –Creation, Metaphysical 21. w Shin - Divine Power, Provision 11. k Kaf –Crowning Accomplishment 22. t Tav - Truth and Perfection 23. Final Kaf (Same as Kaf meaning) 26. Final Peh (Same as Mem meaning) 24. Final Nun (Same as Nun meaning) 27. Final Tzaddi (Same as Tzaddi meaning) 25. Final Mem (Same as Mem meaning) .

Copy Link

Recommended publications

ב Bet ה Heh ו Vav ט Tet י Yod ך מ Mem ם
Exercise 1A: Writing the Hebrew Square Script Using the examples at the right, practice writing out the Hebrew characters on the lines provided for you. Be sure to accurately reflect the position of the letter in relation to the base line. Boxes are used to indicate final forms. Letter Name aleph א aleph bet ב bet gimel ג gimel dalet ד dalet heh ה heh vav ו vav zayin ז zayin .het ח ḥet tet ט tet yod י kaph כ yod ך kaph final kaph lamed ל mem מ lamed ם mem 3 Exercise 1A: Writing tHe Hebrew SquAre Script final mem Letter Name nun נ ן nun final nun samek ס samek ayin ע pe פ ayin ף pe final pe tsade צ ץ tsade final tsade qoph ק qoph resh ר resh שׂ sin sin shin ׁש shin tav ת tav NAme: __________________________________________________ Exercise 1A: Writing tHe Hebrew SquAre Script 4 Exercise 1B: Reading Proper Names In this exercise you will practice identifying the Hebrew consonants by reading familiar proper names. Write the English name in the space to the left of the Hebrew name. Since the alphabet has no vowels, you will have to provide vowel sounds to recognize each word. Start by trying an “a” vowel between each con- sonant. The “a” vowel is the most common vowel in Hebrew and, while it will not always be the correct one, it should help you recognize these names. לבן Laban יעקב אסתר אברהם עבדיה יצחק יחזקאל יׂשראל דוד רבקה נחמיה נבכדנאזר ירבעם ירדן מרדכי מׁשה דברה גלית יׁשמעאל עׂשו 5 Exercise 1B: ReAding Proper NAmes Exercise 1C: Hebrew Cursive (Optional) Using the examples shown, practice writing out the cursive Hebrew characters on the lines provided for you.
[Show full text]
Section a Alphabet and Vocabulary
BLF 1: The Hebrew Alphabet Section A Alphabet And Vocabulary © 2000-2015 Timothy Ministries Page A - 1 BLF 1: The Hebrew Alphabet HBRW Th lphbt s hrd t mstr; Rdng bck t frnt's dsstr. Nlss h's rd the clssfds, whr trth, bbrvtd hds, th wld-b rdr f the Bbl, prsntd wth th txt, s lbl t trn nd rn wth shrks nd hwls- th Hbrw Scrptrs hv n vwls! AN ALEPH-BET SONG G C G Am G D G G C G Am G D G Aleph Bet Gimel Dalet, Hey Vav (Hey Vav), Zay'n Het Tet, Yod Kaf Lamed, Mem Nun (Mem Nun) a b g d h w h w z j f y k l m n m n G C G C G Am G D G Am G D G Samech Ay'n Pe, Tsade Qoph Resh, Shin Tav (Shin Tav) Shin Tav (Shin Tav). s [ p x q r v t v t v t v t Aleph Bet Gimmel Dalet, Hey Vav (Hey Vav), Zay'n Het Tet, Yod Kaf Lamed, Mem Nun (Mem Nun) Samech Ay'n Pey, Tsade, Qoph, Resh, Shin Tav (Shin Tav) Shin Tav (Shin Tav). © 2000-2015 Timothy Ministries Page A - 2 BLF 1: The Hebrew Alphabet Alphabet Chart: Letter Name Pronunciation Print Block Script 1 Aleph Silent letter a a . 2 Bet B as in Baal, B ·b V as in Vine b b 3 Gimel G as in Gehenna g g 4 Dalet D as in Delilah d d 5 Hey H as in Hallelujah h h 6 Vav V as in Vanity w w 7 Zayin Z as in Zion z z 8 Het* CH as in BaCH j t 9 Tet T as in Talent f f 10 Yod Y as in Yiddish y y K as in Kish ] .
[Show full text]
Psalms 119 & the Hebrew Aleph
Psalms 119 & the Hebrew Aleph Bet - Part 18 TZADDI The eighteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet is called “Tsade” or “Tzaddi” (pronounced “tsah-dee”) and has the sound of “ts” as in “nuts.” Tzaddi has the numeric value of 90. In modern Hebrew, the letter Tzaddi can appear in three forms: Writing the Letter: TZADDI Note that the second stroke descends from the right and meets the first stroke about halfway. Note: In the past, Tzaddi sometimes was transliterated using “z” (producing spellings such as “Zion”) and in some academic work you might see it transliterated as an “s” with a dot underneath it. It is commonly transliterated as “tz” (as in mitzvah) among American Jews. The letter Tzaddi (or Tsade), in pictograph, looks something like a man on his side (representing need), whereas the classical Hebrew script (Ketav Ashurit) is constructed of a (bent) Nun with an ascending Yod. (See the picture on the left.) Hebrew speakers may also call this letter Tzaddik (“righteous person”), though this pronunciation probably originated from fast recitation of the Aleph-Bet (i.e., “Tzade, Qoph” -> “tsadiq”). “The wicked man flees though no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion,” Proverbs 28:1. “And I will betroth thee unto Me for ever; yea, I will betroth thee unto Me in Righteousness, and in Judgment, and in Lovingkindness, and in Mercies. I will even betroth thee unto Me in Faithfulness: and thou shalt know Yahweh,” Hosea 2:19-20. Tzaddi Study Page 1 Spiritual Meaning of the Tzaddi Tzaddi = TS and 90 and means “STRONGHOLD”, “FISHER”, “THE WAY” and “RIGHTEOUS SERVANT” TZADDI is almost the same as the word for “A RIGHTEOUS MAN” – TZADDIK.
[Show full text]
The Alphabet
Lesson One: The Alephbet Objectives • to learn the name of each letter • to learn the sequence of the letters • to learn the shape of the letters in book print and cursive • to learn the pronunciation of each letter • to be introduced to the four (five) guttural letters, the daghesh, the six begedkephet letters, the three emphatic letters and the five final letters The Alephbet Aleph zero Bet v b Gimel g in good Dalet d He h Vav v Zayin z Het ch in loch The Alephbet Aleph zero Bet v b Gimel g in good Dalet d He h Vav v Zayin z Het ch in loch The Alephbet Aleph zero Bet v b Gimel g in good Dalet d He h Vav v Zayin z Het ch in loch The Alephbet Aleph zero Bet v b Gimel g in good Dalet d He h Vav v Zayin z Het ch in loch The Alephbet zero Terminology Gutturals Originally pronounced in the throat Terminology Gutturals Cannot double Terminology Gutturals Affect vowels around them The Alephbet The Alephbet Aleph zero Bet v b Gimel g in good Dalet d He h Vav v Zayin z Het ch in loch The Alephbet Aleph zero Bet v b Gimel g in good Dalet d He h Vav v Zayin z Het ch in loch The Alephbet Aleph zero Bet v b Gimel g in good Dalet d He h Vav v Zayin z Het ch in loch The Alephbet Aleph zero Bet v b Gimel g in good Dalet d He h Vav v Zayin z Het ch in loch The Alephbet Aleph zero Bet v b Gimel g in good Dalet d He h Vav v Zayin z Het ch in loch The Alephbet Aleph zero Bet v b Gimel g in good Dalet d
[Show full text]
Four Judean Bullae from the 2014 Season at Tel Lachish
Klingbeil Et Al. Four Judean Bullae from the 2014 Season at Tel Lachish Martin G. Klingbeil, Michael G. Hasel, Yosef Garfinkel, and Néstor H. Petruk The article presents four decorated epigraphic bullae unearthed in the Level III destruction at Lachish during the 2014 season, focusing on the epigraphic, iconographic, and historical aspects of the seal impressions. Keywords: Lachish; Iron Age IIB; West Semitic paleography; ancient Near Eastern icono- graphy; grazing doe; Eliakim; Hezekiah uring the second season of The Fourth Expedi- a series of rooms belonging to a large Iron Age build- tion to Lachish (June–July 2014),1 four deco- ing were excavated.2 The Iron Age building lies just to D rated epigraphic bullae, two of them impressed the north of the northeast corner of the outer courtyard’s by the same seal, were found in Area AA (Fig. 1) where supporting wall of the Palace-Fort excavated by the Brit- ish expedition led by James L. Starkey (Tufnell 1953) and 1 The Fourth Expedition to Lachish is co-sponsored by The In- the Tel Aviv University expedition led by David Ussish- stitute of Archaeology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the kin (2004). This specific location has significance based Institute of Archaeology, Southern Adventist University under the di- rection of Yosef Garfinkel, Michael G. Hasel, and Martin G. Klingbeil. on the excavations in and around the “Solar Shrine” by Consortium institutions include The Adventist Institute of Advanced Yohanan Aharoni (1975) in the 1960s. Studies (Philippines), Helderberg College (South Africa), Oakland The bullae were stored in a juglet found in a room University (USA), Universidad Adventista de Bolivia (Bolivia), Vir- (Square Oa26) located in the southwestern part of the ginia Commonwealth University (USA), and Seoul Jangsin University Iron Age building (Fig.
[Show full text]
Grammar Chapter 1.Pdf
4 A Modern Grammar for Biblical Hebrew CHAPTER 1 THE HEBREW ALPHABET AND VOWELS Aleph) and the last) א The Hebrew alphabet consists entirely of consonants, the first being -Shin) were originally counted as one let) שׁ Sin) and) שׂ Taw). It has 23 letters, but) ת being ter, and thus it is sometimes said to have 22 letters. It is written from right to left, so that in -is last. The standard script for bibli שׁ is first and the letter א the letter ,אשׁ the word written cal Hebrew is called the square or Aramaic script. A. The Consonants 1. The Letters of the Alphabet Table 1.1. The Hebrew Alphabet Qoph ק Mem 19 מ Zayin 13 ז Aleph 7 א 1 Resh ר Nun 20 נ Heth 14 ח Beth 8 ב 2 Sin שׂ Samek 21 ס Teth 15 ט Gimel 9 ג 3 Shin שׁ Ayin 22 ע Yod 16 י Daleth 10 ד 4 Taw ת Pe 23 פ Kaph 17 כ Hey 11 ה 5 Tsade צ Lamed 18 ל Waw 12 ו 6 To master the Hebrew alphabet, first learn the signs, their names, and their alphabetical or- der. Do not be concerned with the phonetic values of the letters at this time. 2. Letters with Final Forms Five letters have final forms. Whenever one of these letters is the last letter in a word, it is written in its final form rather than its normal form. For example, the final form of Tsade is It is important to realize that the letter itself is the same; it is simply written .(צ contrast) ץ differently if it is the last letter in the word.
[Show full text]
Old Phrygian Inscriptions from Gordion: Toward A
OLD PHRYGIAN INSCRIPTIONSFROM GORDION: TOWARD A HISTORY OF THE PHRYGIAN ALPHABET1 (PLATES 67-74) JR HRYYSCarpenter's discussion in 1933 of the date of the Greektakeover of the Phoenician alphabet 2 stimulated a good deal of comment at the time, most of it attacking his late dating of the event.3 Some of the attacks were ill-founded and have been refuted.4 But with the passage of time Carpenter's modification of his original thesis, putting back the date of the takeover from the last quarter to the middle of the eighth century, has quietly gained wide acceptance.5 The excavations of Sir Leonard Woolley in 1936-37 at Al Mina by the mouth of the Orontes River have turned up evidence for a permanent Greek trading settle- ment of the eighth century before Christ, situated in a Semitic-speaking and a Semitic- writing land-a bilingual environment which Carpenter considered essential for the transmission of alphabetic writing from a Semitic- to a Greek-speakingpeople. Thus to Carpenter's date of ca. 750 B.C. there has been added a place which would seem to fulfill the conditions necessary for such a takeover, perhaps only one of a series of Greek settlements on the Levantine coast.6 The time, around 750 B.C., the required 1The fifty-one inscriptions presented here include eight which have appeared in Gordion preliminary reports. It is perhaps well (though repetitive) that all the Phrygian texts appear together in one place so that they may be conveniently available to those interested. A few brief Phrygian inscriptions which add little or nothing to the corpus are omitted here.
[Show full text]
Imperial Aramaic
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N3273R2 L2/07-197R2 2007-07-25 Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set International Organization for Standardization Organisation Internationale de Normalisation Международная организация по стандартизации Doc Type: Working Group Document Title: Preliminary proposal for encoding the Imperial Aramaic script in the SMP of the UCS Source: Michael Everson Status: Individual Contribution Action: For consideration by JTC1/SC2/WG2 and UTC Date: 2007-07-25 1. Background. The Imperial Aramaic script is the head of a rather complex family of scripts. It is named from the use of Aramaic as the language of regional and supraregional correspondance in the Persian Empire though, in fact, the language was in use in this function already before that. The practice continued after the demise of the Persian Empire and was the starting-point for the writing-systems of most of the Middle Iranian languages, namely Inscriptional Parthian, Inscriptional Pahlavi, Psalter Pahlavi, Book Pahlavi, and Avestan. Imperial Aramaic has many other descendents, including Mongolian and possibly Brahmi. The term, “Imperial Aramaic”, refers both to a script and to a language. As a script term, Imperial Aramaic refers to the writing system in use in the Neo-Assyrian and Persian Empires, and was used to write Aramaic, but also other languages. There is no script code for Imperial Aramaic yet registered by ISO 15924. As a language term, Imperial Aramaic refers to a historic variety of Aramaic, as spoken and written during the period roughly from 600 BCE to 200 BCE. The Imperial Aramaic language has been given the ISO 639 language code in “arc”.
[Show full text]
3330 PANGRAMS Single Word Pangrams Leo Seven Words
234 grams of six 3330 PANGRAMS single word pangrams leo seven words. easy to find gyp zax, ar the five word A. ROSS ECKLER Cwm is b Morristown, New Jersey occurring in (65 per cent: A pangram is a set of words in which each letter of the al pangrams cor phabet appears exactly once. Various people, including such dis (qung. shoq, tinguished ma thema ticians as the English logician Augustus De Mor the pangram~ gan and the American information theorist Claude Shannon, have pa ngram in t searched for pangrams that can be arranged in a meaningful sen tence, but all efforts have required extensive explanations of the Because ( message the sentence is attempting to convey. In view of these are very few grams use e difficulties t it seems prudent to abandon this additional require ment, regarding a pa ngram as a list of words and nothing more. are scattered squdge. squa To avoid trivialization of the pangram problem, the additional requirement is imposed that each word in the pangram must contain Unless th at lea st two letters. Otherwise, the pangram constructor can get which uses ( rid of difficult letters such as Q or Z by noting that each letter the pangram of the alphabet can be regarded as a word. of vowelless alluded to e How many different pangrams are possible? Very few are found 11 (always in the literature of recreational linguistics; therefore, it may be which all the somewhat surprising to the average person that thousands of pan grams can be constructed. Using a computer tape of words in Web Despite tt ster's Second Edition prepared by the Air Force in the 1960s, Den set of five pi nis Ritchie of Bell Telephone Laboratories programmed a computer shoq f to search for pangrams and came up with 3330 of them! Many more Qung 'j are possible, for the Air Force tape omits most Websterian words qursh (below the line) that are variant spellings, Biblical names, or qoph j reformed spellings including such prime pangrammatic possibili squdgj ties as qvint (var.
[Show full text]
Preliminary Proposal to Encode the Elymaic Script in Unicode
L2/17-055 2017-02-01 Preliminary proposal to encode the Elymaic script in Unicode Anshuman Pandey [email protected] February 1, 2017 1 Introduction The Elymaic script was identified by Michael Everson in 2001 in “Roadmapping early Semitic scripts” (N2311) as a suitable candidate for encoding in Unicode. It was allocated to the Roadmap to the Supple- mentary Multilingual Plane (SMP) in the same year.1 Yet, to date, no additional information for the script has been submitted. Currently, it rests in scarlet on the Roadmap as ¿Elymaic? at the range U+10EE0..10EFF; the Spanish question marks indicating its status as a script “for which detailed proposals have not yet been written”, and for which “[t]here may be a link to an exploratory code table”. In the sixteen years that have passed since Elymaic was first allocated to the Roadmap, no additional information on the script has been submitted to the Unicode Technical Committee, not even ‘an exploratory code table”. This preliminary pro- posal aims to give some digital dignity to Elymaic and to build a foundation for a future encoding for the script. It provides a tentative character repertoire and code chart, a brief description of the script, and a few specimens illustrating usage of the script. Research is ongoing and a formal proposal is forthcoming. 2 Description Elymaic is a historical right-to-left script derived from Imperial Aramaic. Also known as ‘Elymaean’ in English scholarly literature, the name ‘Elymaic’ refers to Elymais, a state within the Parthian empire (247 – 224 ) that is situated in the present-day region of Khuzestan in Iran.
[Show full text]
The Phoenician Alphabet Reassessed in Light of Its Descendant Scripts and the Language of the Modern Lebanese
1 The Phoenician Alphabet Reassessed in Light of its Descendant Scripts and the Language of the Modern Lebanese Joseph Elias [email protected] 27th of May, 2010 The Phoenician Alphabet Reassessed in Light of its Descendant Scripts and the Language of the Modern Lebanese 2 The Phoenician Alphabet Reassessed in Light of its Descendant Scripts and the Language of the Modern Lebanese DISCLAIMER: THE MOTIVATION BEHIND THIS WORK IS PURELY SCIENTIFIC. HENCE, ALL ALLEGATIONS IMPOSING THIS WORK OF PROMOTING A: POLITICAL, RELIGIOUS OR ETHNIC AGENDA WILL BE REPUDIATED. Abstract The contemporary beliefs regarding the Phoenician alphabet are reviewed and challenged, in light of the characteristics found in the ancient alphabets of Phoenicia's neighbours and the language of the modern Lebanese. 3 The Phoenician Alphabet Reassessed in Light of its Descendant Scripts and the Language of the Modern Lebanese Introduction The Phoenician alphabet, as it is understood today, is a 22 letter abjad with a one-to-one letter to phoneme relationship [see Table 1].1 Credited for being the world's first alphabet and mother of all modern alphabets, it is believed to have been inspired by the older hieroglyphics system of nearby Egypt and/or the syllabaries of Cyprus, Crete, and/or the Byblos syllabary - to which the Phoenician alphabet appears to be a graphical subset of.2 3 Table 1: The contemporary decipherment of the Phoenician alphabet. Letter Name Glyph Phonetic Value (in IPA) a aleph [ʔ] b beth [b] g gamil [g] d daleth [d] h he [h] w waw [w] z zayin [z] H heth [ħ] T teth [tʕ] y yodh [j] k kaph [k] l lamedh [l] m mem [m] n nun [n] Z samekh [s] o ayin [ʕ] p pe [p] S tsade [sʕ] q qoph [q] r resh [r] s shin [ʃ] t tau [t] 1 F.
[Show full text]
Typesetting the Holy Bible in Hebrew, with TEX Yannis Haralarnbous
Typesetting the Holy Bible in Hebrew, with TEX Yannis Haralarnbous To cite this version: Yannis Haralarnbous. Typesetting the Holy Bible in Hebrew, with TEX. Tugboat, TeX Users Group, 1994, Proceedings of the 1994 Annual Meeting, 15 (3), pp.174-191. hal-02100468 HAL Id: hal-02100468 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02100468 Submitted on 23 Apr 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Typesetting the Holy Bible in Hebrew, with TEX Yannis Haralarnbous Centre d'~tudeset de Recherche sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris. Private address: 187, rue Nationale, 59800 Lille, France. Yanni s [email protected] Abstract This paper presents Tiqwah, a typesetting system for Biblical Hebrew, that uses the combined efforts of TEX, METAFONT and GNU Flex. The author describes its use and its features, discusses issues relevant to the design of fonts and placement of floating diacritics, and gives a list of rare cases and typographcal curiosa which can be found in the Bible. The paper concludes with an example of Hebrew Biblical text (the beginning of the book of Genesis) typeset by Tiqwah .
[Show full text]