In the spelling of Hebrew and some other Semitic languages, Matres lectionis (Latin "mothers of reading", singular form: mater lectionis, Hebrew: אֵם קְרִיאָה mother reading), refers to the use of certain consonants to indicate a vowel. The Semitic languages are a Language family whose living representatives are spoken by more than 467 million people across much of the Middle East, Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. The letters that do this in Hebrew are א aleph, ה he, ו waw and י yod. is the reconstructed name of the first letter of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, continued in descended Semitic alphabets as Phoenician He is the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac ܗ and Arabic Waw ( also spelled vav or vau) (In Hebrew Vav) is the sixth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic Yodh (also spelled Yud or Yod) is the tenth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew The yod and waw in particular are more often vowels than they are consonants.
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History
Because of the lack of vowel letters, unambiguous reading of a text would be difficult. Therefore, to indicate vowels (mostly long), consonant letters are used denoting sounds. For example, in the words "the house of" (Hebrew: בית bēt), the middle letter, "י", acts as a vowel versus a consonant. Yodh (also spelled Yud or Yod) is the tenth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew (Contrast bayit, house, where the middle letter is a genuine consonant. ) Matres lectionis are also found in Ugaritic, Moabite and the Phoenician alphabet, but are widely used only in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and Arabic. The Ugaritic alphabet is a Cuneiform Abjad (alphabet without vowels used from around 1500 BCE for the Ugaritic language, an extinct The Moabite language is an extinct Canaanite language spoken in Moab (modern-day northwestern Jordan) in the early first millennium BC Aramaic is a Semitic language with See Syriac (disambiguation for other uses Syriac (syr ܠܫܢܐ ܣܘܪܝܝܐ leššānā Suryāyā) is an Eastern Aramaic language Arabic (ar الْعَرَبيّة (informally ar عَرَبيْ) in terms of the number of speakers is the largest living member of the Semitic language
This system developed as an early system for indicating vowels using the Hebrew alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet (אָלֶף-בֵּית עִבְרִי alephbet ’ivri) consists of 22 letters used for writing the Hebrew language. The consonant letters yod י, waw ו and Aleph א can be given for a rough indication of long vowels. Yodh (also spelled Yud or Yod) is the tenth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Waw ( also spelled vav or vau) (In Hebrew Vav) is the sixth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic is the reconstructed name of the first letter of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, continued in descended Semitic alphabets as Phoenician Where words can be written either with or without matres lectionis, spellings that include these letters are called male (Hebrew) or plene (Latin), meaning "full"; spellings without them are called haser or defective. In some verb forms, matres lectionis are used almost always. In the 9th century, it was decided that the system of matres lectionis did not suffice to indicate the vowels precisely enough, so a supplemental vowel pointing systems (niqqud) (diacritic symbols indicating vowel pronunciation and other important phonological features not written by the traditional basic consonantal orthography) joined matres lectionis as part of the Hebrew writing system. The 9th century is the period from 801 to 900 in accordance with the Julian calendar in the Christian / Common Era. In Hebrew Orthography, niqqud or nikkud ( is the system of Diacritical signs used to represent vowels or distinguish between alternative pronunciations
In some words in Hebrew there is a choice of whether to use a mater lectionis or not, and in modern printed texts matres lectionis are sometimes used even for short vowels, which is considered to be grammatically incorrect though instances are found as far back as Talmudic times. In Talmudic times texts from Palestine were noticeably more inclined to male spellings than texts from Babylonia: this may reflect the influence of Greek, which had full alphabetic spelling. Similarly in the Middle Ages Ashkenazim tended to use male spellings under the influence of European languages, while Sephardim tended to use haser spellings under the influence of Arabic.
In Arabic there is no such choice, and the almost invariable rule is that a long vowel is written with a mater lectionis and a short vowel with a diacritic symbol, although the Othmani orthography, the one in which Quran is traditionally written an printed, has some differences which are not always consistent.
Usage in Hebrew
Most commonly, yod י indicates i or e, while waw ו indicates o or u. Aleph א was not systematically developed as a mater lectionis in Hebrew (as it was in Aramaic and Arabic), but it is occasionally used to indicate an a vowel. Aramaic is a Semitic language with Arabic (ar الْعَرَبيّة (informally ar عَرَبيْ) in terms of the number of speakers is the largest living member of the Semitic language (However, a silent aleph — indicating an original glottal stop consonant sound which has become silent in Hebrew pronunciation — can occur after almost any vowel. This article is about the sound in spoken language For the letter see Glottal stop (letter. ) At the end of a word, He ה can also be used to indicate that a vowel should be pronounced.
Examples:
Symbol Name Vowel formation Vowel quality Example Hebrew Transliteration א Alef ê, ệ, ậ, â, ô mostly ā פארן Paran ה He ê, ệ, ậ, â, ô mostly ā or e לאה Leah שה Seh ו Waw ô, û ō or ū יואל Yo'el ברוך Baruch י Yod î, ê, ệ ī, ē or ǣ דויד David
Origins and development
Historically, the practice of using matres lectionis seems to have originated when [ay] and [aw] diphthongs (written using the yod י and waw ו consonant letters respectively) monophthongized to simple long vowels [ē] and [ō]. Transliteration is the practice of Transcribing a Word or text written in one Writing system into another writing system or system of rules for such practice The Desert of Paran or Wilderness of Paran ( Hebrew מדבר פארן Midbar Par'an) is quite likely the place where the Israelites spent part of their Leah ( "Weary tired" is the first of the four concurrent wives of the Hebrew patriarch Jacob, and mother of six of the Twelve Tribes of Israel along David, Arabic: داوود or داود dawud, "beloved" was the second king of the united Kingdom of Israel according to the Hebrew Bible This epiphenomenal association between consonant letters and vowel sounds was then seized upon and used in words without historic diphthongs.
In general terms, it is observable that early Phoenician texts have very few matres lectionis, and that during most of the 1st millennium B. C. E. Hebrew and Aramaic were quicker to develop matres lectionis than Phoenician. However, in its latest period of development in North Africa (referred to as "Punic"), the Phoenician language developed a very full use of matres lectionis (including the use of the letter `Ayin ע, also used for this purpose much later in Yiddish orthography). The Punic language is an extinct Semitic language formerly spoken in the Mediterranean region of North Africa and several Mediterranean islands, by people of For the village in Azerbaijan see Əyin. or is the sixteenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician The Yiddish language is written using Hebrew script as the basis of a full vocalic Alphabet.
In pre-exilic Hebrew, there was a significant development of the use of the letter He ה to indicate word final vowels other than ī and ū. This was probably inspired by the phonological change of the third-person singular possessive suffix from [ahū] > [aw] > [ō] in most environments. However, in later periods of Hebrew the orthography was changed so that word-final ō was no longer written with the letter He ה (except in a few archaically-spelled proper names, such as Solomon שלמה and Shiloh שלה). The difference between the spelling of the third-person singular possessive suffix (as attached to singular nouns) with He ה in early Hebrew vs. with waw ו in later Hebrew has become an issue in the authentication of the Jehoash Inscription. The James Ossuary On October 21, 2002, a press conference co-hosted by the Discovery Channel and the Biblical Archaeology Society,
According to Sass (5), already in the Middle Kingdom there were some cases of matres lectionis, i. e. consonant graphemes which were used to transcribe vowels in foreign words, namely in Punic (Jensen 290, Naveh 62), Aramaic, and Hebrew (he, waw, yod; sometimes even aleph; Naveh 62). Naveh (ibid. ) notes that the earliest Aramaic and Hebrew documents already used matres lectionis. Aramaic is a Semitic language with Some scholars argue that therefore the Greeks must have borrowed their alphabet from the Arameans. But the practice has older roots: the Semitic cuneiform alphabet of Ugarit (13th ct. The Ugaritic alphabet is a Cuneiform Abjad (alphabet without vowels used from around 1500 BCE for the Ugaritic language, an extinct BC) already has matres lectionis (Naveh 138).
Influence on other languages
Later, in some adaptations of the Arabic alphabet (such those used for Persian and Uyghur) and of the Hebrew alphabet (such as those used for the Yiddish and Ladino languages), matres lectionis were generally used for all or most vowels, thus in effect becoming vowel letters: see Yiddish orthography. Uyghur (/ ug-Latn Uyƣurqə/ug-Cyrl Уйғурчә, or / ug-Latn Uyƣur tili/ug-Cyrl Уйғур Yiddish (yi [[wiktייִדיש ייִדיש]] yidish or yi [[wiktאידיש אידיש]] idish, literally "Jewish" is a nonterritorial High The Yiddish language is written using Hebrew script as the basis of a full vocalic Alphabet. This tendency was taken to its logical conclusion in fully alphabetic scripts such as the Greek, Roman and Cyrillic alphabets. The Cyrillic alphabet (səˈrɪlɪk also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters is actually a family of Alphabets, subsets of which are used by The vowel letters in these languages historically go back to matres lectionis in the Phoenician script: for example, the letter I was originally derived from the consonant letter yod. Similarly the vowel letters in Avestan are adapted from matres lectionis in the version of the Aramaic script used for Pahlavi. Avestan is an Eastern Old Iranian language that was used to compose the sacred hymns and canon of the Zoroastrian Avesta.
Bibliography
- Garr, W. Randall. 1985. Dialect Geography of Syria-Palestine, 1000-586 B. C. E. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
- Jensen, Hans. 1970. Sign Symbol and Script. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Transl. of Die Schrift in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften. 1958, as revised by the author.
- Naveh, Joseph. 1979. Die Entstehung des Alphabets. Transl. of Origins of the Alphabet. Zürich und Köln. Benziger.
- Sass, Benjamin. 1991. Studia Alphabetica. On the origin and early history of the Northwest Semitic, South Semitic and Greek alphabets. CH-Freiburg: Universitätsverlag Freiburg Schweiz. Fribourg ( French) (Freiburg or de Freiburg im [[Üechtland]], often Fribourg) is the capital of the Swiss canton of Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
See also
In Hebrew Orthography, niqqud or nikkud ( is the system of Diacritical signs used to represent vowels or distinguish between alternative pronunciations Ktiv Hasar Niqqud ( כתיב חסר ניקוד literally "spelling lacking niqqud" ( Colloquially known as Ktiv Male ( כתיב מלא literally "full The mappiq ( Hebrew: מפיק also mapiq, mapik, mappik, lit "causing to go out" is a Diacritic used in the Hebrew Tiberian Hebrew is an extinct (yet very well documented Oral tradition of pronunciation for ancient Hebrew, especially the Hebrew of the Tanakh, that wasDapyx Software network: MP3 Explorer | Ebook Manager | Zenithic