Lesson 3 | Vowels
[1] What Are the Dots and Lines?
Many centuries ago, and centuries after the original composition of the Hebrew Bible, small dots and lines were added around the letters to aid the reader in pronunciation. These marks are useful in that they provide a traditional Jewish textual-level interpretation. That is, we can see how the Masoretes (who developed these markings) read different passages in cases where the Hebrew letters alone are not definitive in their intention.
In addition—and of greatest importance to you now as you begin to learn Hebrew—is the fact that many of these markings make it easier to read the text. In this course and Hebrew II and III, you will learn those markings that will aid you in this way, while the full breadth and precision of Hebrew’s “diacritic” marks will be left aside so as to not overwhelm you.
These extra markings can be divided into three categories.
Vowels
Given that the Hebrew alphabet is primarily made up of consonants alone, vowel sounds are indicated with dots and lines below, above, and next to the letters. Note that these markings will change (as will the pronunciation) as a word is given prefixes or a suffix, or is inflected to a certain parsing. In fact, the word that comes before can also affect a word’s exact pronunciation and vowel markings. Thus, the way you say a word depends on how it is used in a sentence, but the pronunciation differences alone do not change a word’s meaning.
While this might sound complicated, it is actually far easier than English. In English, the way a word is spelled does not tell you all you need to know about how it is pronounced. For example, take the word woman. The first half of this word is written the same but pronounced differently when used in the singular (“woman”) versus the plural (“women”). That is, the “wo-” in “woman” is pronounced wu, whereas the “wo-” in “women” pronounced wi. The pronunciation has changed though it is written the same!
On the other hand, the vowel markings in Hebrew are there to tell you exactly how to pronounce the word. Like English, pronunciation will change depending on how the word is used (singular versus plural, etc). But unlike English, the Hebrew vowel markings will make this change plain.
Doubling
In the previous lesson we noted how the sounds of the letters כ ,ב, and פ change depending on whether the letter begins or ends a syllable. We also learned that this is indicated by the presence or absence of a middle dot.
There are other letters that can likewise be written with a middle dot (note the ק ,י and מ in the image above), but this does not change their pronunciation—at least when using a Modern Hebrew pronunciation, as we will do. The rules for when they receive this middle dot are also far more involved. For these reasons, we will not be learning these rules.
Cantillation
The final category of extra markings are a series of accents called cantillation marks. (These are the blue dots and lines in the image at the top of this step.) There are a couple dozen of them and they are useful for knowing where to place the accent when pronouncing a word, and also can indicate the breakdown of sentences (like we use commas). Learning all of them is complicated, but can be helpful. We will learn the most important of them in Hebrew III.
Eventually, you will want to learn how to differentiate between vowel markings and cantillation marks. But at first, this is pretty tough. For this reason, passages embedded in this course will have their cantillation marks removed for the next several lessons. However, the video commentaries will include cantillation marks to help you begin becoming accustomed to seeing them.