This week was mostly about new vocab and learning how letters function. Hebrew can be tough since Semitic alphabets work quite differently than roman ones. One of the big differences that I have noticed in both arabic and hebrew is that letters can be written differently depending on where they are in the word. In arabic, most letters have 4 different ways of writing them, since all letters conjoin in some way to letters around them. It makes writing in Arabic like writing very complicated cursive. Hebrew is much simpler, but has still has a couple letters like this, such as the letter nun (n). There is a variant of the letter called nun sofit, or final nun, which is only used when a word is ended with a nun. I am curious why this holdover from ancient semitic languages was kept in modern hebrew - it doesn't have any real use that I or Israelis can figure out since Hebrew is never conjoined.
Another interesting similarity is the letter ayin. In arabic this is a very common consonant and learning to pronounce it correctly is very important in terms of fluency. In hebrew this letter still exists, but it is always silent, with no exceptions that my language partner could think of. Again, why keep it? I think part of the reason is that when Hebrew was revived, there was a huge lack of vocabulary since the language had been stagnant for so long, so the government resorted to using ancient words to describe new concepts. But these words could only be written with ayin, so they decided it was easier to keep the letter rather than change the vocabulary. I am not certain about this though, so I think I will do more research/ ask someone who knows more about ancient hebrew.
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