Hebrew Language

Hebrew Language





The Hebrew alphabet is either of two distinct Semitic alphabets - the Early Hebrew and the Classical, or Square, Hebrew.
Hebrew is written from right to left, rather than left to right as in English, so Alef is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and Tav is the last. The Hebrew alphabet is often called the "alefbet," because of its first two letters.
The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters.
There are two versions of some letters. Kaf, Mem, Nun, Pe and Tzade all are written differently when they appear at the end of a word than when they appear in the beginning or middle of the word. The version used at the end of a word is referred to as Final Kaf, Final Mem, etc. The version of the letter on the left is the final version. In all cases except Final Mem, the final version has a long tail.
Like most early Semitic alphabetic writing systems, the alefbet has no vowels. People who are fluent in the language do not need vowels to read Hebrew, and most things written in Hebrew in Israel are written without vowels. However, the rabbis realized the need for aids to pronunciation, so they developed a system of dots and dashes called n'kudot (points). These dots and dashes are written above or below the letter, in ways that do not alter the spacing of the line. Text containing these markings is referred to as "pointed" text.
Some Hebrew letters have two pronunciations. Bet, Kaf, and Pe have a "hard" sound (the first sound) and a "soft" sound (the second sound). In pointed texts, these letters have dots in the center when they are to be pronounced with the hard sound.
The style of writing commonly seen in Hebrew books. It is referred to as block print or sometimes Assyrian text.
For sacred documents, such as torah scrolls or the scrolls inside tefillin and mezuzot, there is a special writing style with "crowns" (crows-foot-like marks coming up from the upper points) on many of the letters. This style of writing is known as STA"M (an abbreviation for "Sifrei Torah, Tefillin and Mezuzot," which is where you will see that style of writing. For more information about the STA"M alphabet, including illustrations and relevant rules, see Hebrew Alphabet used in writing STA"M.
The process of writing Hebrew words in the Roman (English) alphabet is known as 'transliteration'. Transliteration is more an art than a science, and opinions on the correct way to transliterate words vary widely. This is why the Jewish festival of lights (in Hebrew, Chet-Nun-Kaf-He) is spelled Chanukah, Chanukkah, Hanuka, and many other interesting ways. Each spelling has a legitimate phonetic and orthographic basis; none is right or wrong.
Early Hebrew was the alphabet used by the Jewish nation in the period before the Babylonian Exile--i.e., prior to the 6th century BC--although some inscriptions in this alphabet may be of a later date. Several hundred inscriptions exist. As is usual in early alphabets, Early Hebrew exists in a variety of local variants and also shows development over time; the oldest example of Early Hebrew writing, the Gezer Calendar, dates from the 10th century BC, and the writing used varies little from the earliest North Semitic alphabets.
The Early Hebrew alphabet, like the modern Hebrew variety, had 22 letters, with only consonants represented, and was written from right to left; but the early alphabet is more closely related in letter form to the Phoenician than to the modern Hebrew. Its only surviving descendant is the Samaritan alphabet, still used by a few hundred Samaritan Jews.
Between the 6th and 2nd century BC, Classical, or Square, Hebrew gradually displaced the Aramaic alphabet, which had replaced Early Hebrew in Palestine. Square Hebrew became established in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC and developed into the modern Hebrew alphabet over the next 1,500 years.
It was apparently derived from the Aramaic alphabet rather than from Early Hebrew but was nonetheless strongly influenced by the Early Hebrew script.
Classical Hebrew showed three distinct forms by the 10th century AD: Square Hebrew, a formal or book hand; rabbinical or "Rashi-writing," employed by medieval Jewish scholars; and various local cursive scripts, of which the Polish-German type became the modern cursive form.




According to Stan Tenen these gestures and the position of "The Light in the Meeting Tent" will yield these specific letters.
When Tenen broke the first word of Genesis into its 'subatomic particles' (the word is actually comprised of two smaller words, meaning "fire" and "six-edged thorn"), he took the "thorn" to mean a tetrahedron and constructed a model of it, placing the "fire," or torus "vortex" form, inside. Tenen noticed that the model, which he calls "The Light In the Meeting Tent" also reflected the polarity of perfect symmetry (the tetrahedron) and asymmetry (the vortex form). As he studied it, he discovered it was even more multifaceted than he had realized. "When I looked through the faces of the tetrahedron at the vortex, each view displayed a different letter in the Hebrew alphabet," he says. And," he mentions almost casually," I realized the 27 gestures that accompany the letters correspond to the 27 'preferred' pointing directions used in hyper-dimensional space."

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The Hebrew languages refer to a variety of Canaanite languages and dialects historically spoken by various peoples in the region of Canaan whom Abrahamic religion believes to have been Hebrews who emigrated from the Chaldees. These different languages were not necessarily more or less related to each other than to other Canaanite languages, and their traditional distinction as Hebrew languages is almost purely by religious belief.Of the varieties of Hebrew, only one - Modern Hebrew - is used as a spoken language today, and is one of the official languages of the State of Israel. A few others survive as liturgical languages, but are otherwise not actively used in daily life.

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