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This may be a silly question though I am unsure of this is the case for Hebrew.

I know often the vowels are not shown in Hebrew in writing. Curious if it changes the words can be interpreted many ways or not.

In English for example "rd" could be road, read, rude, rad, rod, etc. Is this also the case in Hebrew? Or does everyone reading understand what the word is, even without context clues.

curiousdannii
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Lain
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2 Answers2

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While there can always be some ambiguity, Hebrew and other Semitic languages have a system of triconsonantal roots, in which each sequence of three consonants suggests the meaning of the word. For example, the root k-t-b, meaning "to write", is used to derive words like kāṯaḇti כתבתי "I wrote", kāṯaḇ כתב "he wrote", kattāḇ כתב "reporter" (m), kəṯāḇ כתב "handwriting", kəṯōḇeṯ כתובת "address", and kəṯīḇ כתיב "spelling" (m).

As you can see, several of these have identical or very similar spelling, so there is some amount of guessing based on the context (the sentence "a reporter wrote about his handwriting": "כתב כתב על כתב ידו", has the word "כתב" repeated three times, but one can probably guess it's not saying "a handwriting reporter-ed about his wrote"), but as unlike in English, triconsonantal roots are an inherent part of Hebrew, some of the context is helped by recognizing the k-t-b root.

To use your example, the reason "rd" wouldn't be as understandable in English is that the history of English vocabulary includes vowels and has many words with the same consonants, if English had had the same morphological system as Hebrew it's likely we'd have the root r-d connected to, say, the general meaning of "road", and words with an r-d root might include things like "road", "pavement", "asphalt", "carriage tracks", etc., while words like "read" or "rude" could be folded in under other roots with generalized meanings like "to read" or "to insult".

klpkt
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    sing,sang,sung; write,wrote,written. ride,road. – user6726 Oct 09 '19 at 16:45
  • @Keelan You're right, I wasn't meaning to imply the writing system caused the root system, I added that paragraph just to explain why the two languages are fundamentally different in vocabulary; if English had had a triconsonantal (or, in the case I invented of r-d being a root, biconsonantal?) root system then the word rd would likely not be able to mean both road, read, and rude, in the same way that k-t-b has only one type of meaning. – klpkt Oct 09 '19 at 17:27
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    Is there any evidence that abjads were developed without vowels specifically because of the existence of the Semitic triconsonantal root system? I keep hearing it as a justification, but to me subjectively it seems like the many meanings that a triconsonantal root can assume can be enough cause for confusion for vowels to be desirable. So do we have a specific reason to believe this is the... reason, or is it just that some linguists thought it made sense as an explanation for the lack of vowels, and then it stuck as a classic justification? – LjL Oct 09 '19 at 18:04
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    @LjL Right, so this question is a little hard to answer because in general in linguistics we do not ask why something did not happen (unless there is sufficient cross-linguistic material to suggest that it would normally happen). We also don't have much evidence, so the earliest alphabetic writing (Proto-Canaanite) is not fully deciphered. Nevertheless we have enough data to say the following, based on Joseph Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet, Jerusalem / Leiden 1982, pp. 23–42 (summary on p. 42): – Keelan Oct 10 '19 at 06:57
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    @LjL (1) Proto-Canaanite was invented ca. 1700 BC by Canaanites with some knowledge of hieroglyphs; (2) the letter signs mostly had acrophonic values. See wiki for some certain values, e.g. aleph from ʔalp 'ox'. This combined with the fact that the Canaanite syllable structure is CV or CVC, but never starts with V, leads to all letters having a consonantal value. – Keelan Oct 10 '19 at 07:01
  • LjL, since the alphabet was developed by the Phoenicians, a semitic people (whose language was close to Hebrew), they evidentially developed a writing system which they considered suitable. Moreover, since the Phoenicians wrote cuneiform on clay tablets - not with a pen on paper - it was important to write less, and I guess they realized they can leave out the vowel marks without loss of understanding. In fact it was so good enough that nobody added vowel marks to Hebrew before 600 AD, 2000 years after the Phoenician script was invented! – Nadav Har'El Oct 10 '19 at 07:04
  • @LjL Ugaritic later develops three different alephs depending on the following vowel (a, i or u) but this is a later invention (ibid., p. 31). And of course Hebrew and Aramaic develop matres lectionis - these are the result of various sound changes. For instance, the name pnmw /Panammuwa/ would lose its final short vowel (around 1000BC); hence /Panammuw/ > /Panammū/, which leads to w being read for /ū/. – Keelan Oct 10 '19 at 07:05
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    @NadavHar'El (1) I don't think this is a good representation of the development. The Phoenicians did not sit down and think what would be a good representation of their language; the script was formed organically from predecessors. They did not make the decision to leave out vowel signs but simply never thought about it - they also did not think about adding consonant length, pitch, emphasis, punctuation, etc. for the same reasons. (2) Hebrew developed vowel signs already around 1000 BCE if you count matres lectionis. – Keelan Oct 10 '19 at 07:09
  • @Keelan since the Phoenician did come up with the first "alphabet", I think it's hard to theorize what they thought about and what they didn't. It's not like they just copied someone else's invention like the Greeks, and then Etruscans and finally Romans, did. You are right about maters lectonis but these were very rare, and as evidenced in the Hebrew bible - often used inconsistently, as reading aid only when they thought it was helpful. And by the small number of these, it seems the Hebrew readers didn't think they needed too much of them! – Nadav Har'El Oct 10 '19 at 07:20
  • @NadavHar'El the Phoenicians did not come up with the first alphabet, since we already have predecessors in so-called Proto-Canaanite (see my earlier references to Naveh and Wikipedia). The correspondences with other alphabets make it quite clear that organic growth is involved. You did not reply to my point that vowels are just one of many aspects of language that one might encode (consonant length, pitch, etc.) - are you suggesting that the Phoenicians thought about those as well? Also by your 600CE time matres lectionis were not rare at all; have a look at Qumran. – Keelan Oct 10 '19 at 07:37
  • @Keelan thanks for all this. I'm not sure I get the thesis, though: you say "in linguistics we don't ask why something did not happen", but my question was like "do we know that these abjads had no vowels due to Semitic triconsonantal roots, or could it be for another reason entirely?". I appreciate that the Phoenicians (or others) didn't sit down and invent a "good" system. Is a sound paraphrasis of your answer "no, we don't know it was due to triconsonantal roots; actually it was likely due to the letters having acrophobic values, in a language where words all started with consonants"? – LjL Oct 10 '19 at 15:49
  • I think once we're sure we're on the same page, I should probably ask this as an independent question. – LjL Oct 10 '19 at 15:50
  • @LjL my point is: clearly if the language required it, the writing system would have indicated vowels. But on the other hand there is a whole continuum between "needing to indicate vowels" and "not needing to indicate vowels at all". For English, vowels are not necessary but very helpful, and it has them. North-west Semitic clearly didn't need them, but still developed them in the end. So I'd say it's a combination of (1) your correct paraphrasis and (2) the morphology not being such that it strictly requires vowels to be indicated. // A separate question sounds like a good idea! – Keelan Oct 10 '19 at 18:32
  • My Hebrew lingers somewhere just short of nonexistent; I know a little bit about Amharic, though I’m aware that’s sort of on the other end of the Semitic spectrum. In Amharic, vowels are frequently used to form derived stems from verbs, which have related, but different meanings. I imagine that could very ambiguous in an abjad, even to a native speaker (Amharic, of course, is written in an abugida) – does Hebrew have something similar? – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 11 '20 at 21:00
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Yes, Hebrew has binyanim (verb templates) that sometimes differ only in the vowels (or in vowels + gemination), so such ambiguity can occur. – TKR May 12 '20 at 00:55
  • it's worth pointing out that the semitic abjads likely inherited their consonantal nature from the hieroglyphs they descend from. Hieroglyphs in Middle Egyptian and later were largely consonantal (with some ideographic determinatives, and many hieroglyphs representing series of consonants) and also left the vowels unwritten – Tristan May 12 '20 at 09:06
  • with that in mind, it's probably more accurate to say that the root+pattern structure of the Semitic languages meant they had less incentive to develop explicit vowel marking (although many did, later), whereas such vowel marking generally appeared almost immediately once adopted by non-Semitic languages (e.g. Greeks, Indo-Iranians) where the vowels were more likely to carry lexical (as opposed to grammatical) information – Tristan May 12 '20 at 09:08
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Chiming in a bit late, but of course vowels can change the meaning of a word in Hebrew, sometimes drastically. Just as a favorite example, the word לבנה can be read, depending on diacritical marking ("nikkud") as:

LEVENAH (brick), LEVANA (white, feminine gender), LIVNEH (a genus of shrub, Styrax), LIVNAH (to her son), LIBNAH (she clarified), LEVONAH (frankincense), LABNEH (strained yogurt)... And I can think of at least three additional variations, I expect there are more than that.

Still, most of the time a native reader will know which word was meant from context. The times when it is not immediately clear are a great source of puns and written humor.

Yuval Kfir
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