(BA) Hebrew vowels

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24 July 2022 index-topical-hb

Because the Hebrew alphabet lacks letters reserved for expressing vowels, vowels have always presented some degree of difficulty for those reading ancient Hebrew texts. To a large degree, this issue becomes less important through the use of matres lectionis. But later, some time around 800 CE, a full system of vowels, by means of small markings mostly above and below the consonants, was created.

As a result, for those interested in recovering the earliest possible forms of the Hebrew text, it is always worth remembering that the full vowels were not present in the written text for the first thousand or more years of most of the Hebrew Bible's existence. So there is always the question of how accurately the traditional vowels represent the intentions of the earliest writers. It is easy to gloss over this fact. I will be guilty of it sometimes myself.

There are, according to the listing found in found in Joüon-Muraoka,^[1] seven basic Hebrew vowel sounds. They are -- though I will spell them a bit differently than Joüon-Muraoka -- hiriq, tsere, segol, patah, qamats, holam, qubuts. Qubuts, according to J-M, is pronounced identically to shuruq, which is graphically different different from it for historical reasons but does not represent a difference of pronunciation or phoneme.

There is also the shva, arguably a half-vowel or non-vowel, and its cousins the hataf patah, hataf qamats, and hataf segol.