Lesson 1 | Letters

[2] Oddball Letters

Let’s focus in on the goofy letters in Hebrew.

Dual-sound letters
You will remember from the א-ב song that four of the letters make one of two different sounds depending on whether they have a middle dot (called a dagesh). Or, in the case of ש, its sound depends on where the top dot is located. There are actually two different things happening here.

With the first three letters in the chart below, the pronunciation depends upon whether the letter is beginning or ending a syllable. Given prefixes, suffixes, and morphology (how words “morph” with different parsings) in Hebrew, this means that the same letter in the same word can sound like a b in one context and a v in another. But no worries: you will always know which to say based on the presence or absence of the middle dot. Furthermore, the meaning is completely unaffected.

On the other hand, שׁ and שׂ are, in effect, different letters. That is to say, a שׁ will never get changed to a שׂ or vice versa. Rather, the presence of one over the other indicates which word we are dealing with.

Dual-sound letters

        b
        בּ
        ב
        v
      
        k
        כּ
        כ
        ch
      
        p
        פּ
        פ
        f
      
        sh
        שׁ
        שׂ
        s
      
Final-form letters
As mentioned in the previous step, Hebrew also contains five letters that use a distinct form when they appear as the last letter in a word. Here, as with the first three dual-sound letters, meaning is not affected. You just need to be able to read them!

Final letters

        כ
        ך
        
        מ
        ם
        
        נ
        ן
        
        פ
        ף
        
        צ
        ץ
        
Vowel-absorbing letters
The last thing to know about the 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet is that three of them can act as vowels. Again, vowels in Hebrew are indicated through the placement of small dots and lines around the letters. The three letters below can be absorbed into those vowel markings at times and lose their consonantal function. This is much the same as the letter y in English. By default, y is a consonant as in the word yellow. But at times it can lose its ya sound and do all sorts of different things. In the word gray it affects the sound of the a, but itself is silent. In cyan it makes an ai sound. And in baby blue it is pronounced ee. The following letters in Hebrew can also be flexible, though thankfully not quite as flexible as the letter y in English! We will learn more of what they can do in Lesson 3.

Special letters
Can act as vowels

        ו
        
        י
        
        ה