The Hebrew Alphabet is very different from the English alphabet for many reasons. First of all, the language is read and written from Right to Left not Left to Right (as in English or Spanish). Next, Modern Hebrew is not written in the Latin script, it is written in a script similar to the Assyrian script. Additionally, because the language is used for both secular and religious reasons the language has been transliterated for non-religious American Jews when they decide to go to synagogue for services or Holidays. For mystical believers the language has numerical values which can be used to predict events or give a deeper meaning to Jewish traditions. However, the most striking feature about the Hebrew language from English is that Hebrew does not use any vowels. This has been a hard feature to learn about the language, because when I learned Hebrew as a child, I used the pronunciation guides (vowels). The "vowels" are used in Modern Hebrew, as my language partner stated "when I was in school, we stopped using the vowels in first grade. The key is to become more and more familiar with the vocabulary and to start to put the words into context and you will figure out what word you are talking about."
The following link shows the various ways of writing the Hebrew language. Present day, we only use the Printed and Cursive styles of Hebrew. However, the other forms are necessary for reading older books such as the Talmud (commentaries on the Torah (Five books written by Moses)) or Mezuzot (Prophets).
http://www.mezuzah.net/scripts.html
The following link is very thorough and goes into finer detail about the language and writing system.
Comments