Greek uses symilar to Arameic letter names and is possibly related. Macedonian, on the other hand, is an old slavic language using phonems and all german researchers always call it "ancient greek". There was no introduction but inentional invention. Slovians => Slowo [polish] = Word [English]. Okrag [polish] = circle, Oko [polish] = Eye, usmiech [polish] = smile with a shape of U. Polish Alphabet = Abecadlo = ABeCaDlo
@@leonazar hahahahahaha this comment made my day. I'm learning greek, I feel you. They need to update their spelling ASAP... looks very cool as it is right now though
As a native Arab, I see that many of these problems arise from the fact that some letters lost the original pronunciations in Hebrew. That's why when I learn a word like tekes, I can't possibly misspel it, because in Arabic, we have the same word with the same spelling and meaning but the t is not the usual t, nor is the k. This is a great aid in memorising Hebrew words. Just the knowledge of Arabic gives a huge unfair advantage.
Finally someone gets it. I am a Hebrew learner of a few years, and dabbled in a little Arabic for fun, and it actually added a lot of context, because I feel like Ancient Hebrew was much closer to Arabic than today, adding a explanations to the different letters
@@apstamp4560 Yes, there's that, but also, Arabic was extensively referenced in the process of reviving Hebrew. So not all the similarities go back to ancient times. Arabic had developed non-stop, so there was no point in reinventing the wheel, and adapting a semitic language to absorb all the scientific and modern terminologies of western languages presented many challenges.
@@apstamp4560 The way Hebrew was revived and is taught today is, methinks, heavily influenced by European tongues. That's not due to ignorance of Hebrew's original pronunciation, but to make it easier to grasp for the hundreds of thousands of European learners that had to learn it from the ground up and with no native speakers to interact with.
For example, that notion that ע is a vowel, or that ט is another ת are gross simplifications. But that's easier to teach than sounds that have no equivalent in any European tongue.
@@apstamp4560 Let's also remember that the modern Hebrew alphabet is not Hebrew. It's Aramaic. It wasn't created for this language, and that adds another level of unnecessary complexity.
@@gaviswayze9696, there isn't a joke, really. It's just a Russian word meaning “a whole-ass disaster” or “a clusterfuck”, and hearing it in the middle of an English-language rant about the Hebrew alphabet was unexpected but delightful and fitting, heh.
@@ajrollo1437not weird, it's just like in English converting 2 V's into a W, except not always the same sound. Anyway anyone learning Hebrew in religious school (especially in Ashkenazi Europe or America) learns of the consecutive letters "Beis and Veis' or Tof and Sof. Just need a decent (read non Israeli) instruction and learning system
@@nngnnadas at one point there was a Soviet orthography as well that rivaled YIVO orthography in terms of publication output and that de-hebraicized Hebrew loanwords so for instance Sholem Aleichem‘s name was שאָלעם־אלייכעם
As someone who speaks Arabic fluently in a native level Hebrew does make sense The worst thing that the pure semitic sounds of some letters was lost in the European jewish communities
It was actually kept second best only to Yemen in Ashkenazi Jewish communities but in Israel we all pretty much dont keep it except for some Yemeni Jews
@@Yahli20 well most sephardic and mizrahi Jews keep the original pronunciation of those letters Specially the sounding of ɛayin "Ɛ"ع is a beautiful semitic letter alongside Ḥ/ح
I speak Spanish, my mother language. I speak English. I learned it in Boston after living there for 15 years. I learned Haitian Creole in 2003. I can speak, read and write French. In 2014 I started to learned Japanese. I can speak it, and I can read it and write it in Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. I just started to learn how to read Hebrew, and I find your video very funny. Keep it up.
As a learner of Arabic who decided to look at Hebrew for fun to see the similarities, the writing system is what scared me off. I could successfully read Arabic with educated guesses after only about a month, but Hebrew I can’t even keep track of what sounds a character makes and the redundancy makes it worse 😭
I completely understand. Alot of it comes down to context, which is hard to have if you don't know much vocab, or know alot about the spoken language. Another thing is being aware of the doubles (the letters that make two separate sounds, so bet and vet for example). Even though there are only 22 letters, we have the sofits, which are letters with different forms when they're at the end of a word (mem vs. mem sofit). Then we have the issue of loan words, which are spelled in their own.. special way, if you will. Loan words are only spelled in hebrew with the letters that 100% are to make a certain needed sound. I know people say this alot, but you must practice. It took me 5 weeks of using flashcards everyday to get to the point where I could even read words (with nikkud).
Standard Arabic has only the vowels a, i, and u. Of course this reduces the guessing greatly. If you want to learn spoken Syrian or Moroccan, you'll guess more.
@@stephanpopp6210getting into arabic right now, i heard people saying you cant guess and have to know every word, but at the same time there are people who say you can guess. Can you enlighten me on that? At the moment i cant read much and just guess the vowel is “a”
@@Belti200 You can guess in many cases, but not in all. E.g. adjectives normally have the vowel pattern a - i (ee). So if you read something spelt KBIR, you know that it is pronounced "kabeer" (big). The more complicated verbs also have vowel patterns that hold for all, e.g. "yanfatihu" = it opens can only have these vowels, because it is a "no. 7" stem (with an n). On the other hand, short words without a long vowel often need to be guessed. "Cat" is "hirr", not "harr", "dog" is "kalb", not "kulb", "it falls" is "yasqut", not "yasqat". You need to learn that. Other than in Hebrew, there is no e or o.
@@Belti200 Well yes, native speakers guess all the time when they read. Given that you've acquired considerable amount of vocabulary, context will be your best friend. Similar to how you can spot the difference between record and record in a given sentence. But even without context you can still guess most of the time. And the answer is to get into morphology aka sarf. I can explain more if you'd like
Knowing the history of words in the Semitic family really makes the nonsense comprehensible. It is as one linguist put it once "If you want to understand a semitic language, understand Arabic first, you'll save yourself a lot of trouble"
semitic" is It's just mumbled Arabic, really. Imagine English with a third of its letters removed, and simplified grammar. Thats Aramaic, hebrew, etc. For example, combine T,D into just T no need to have 2 letters. Same for i, e, y they all should be just y from now on, etc etc. Arabic is the only corollary to proto-semitic, infact the whole semitic classification is nonsensical for anyone with a somewhat functioning mass between their ears. hebrew, aramaic, rest of madeup dialect continua only have 22 letters of the 29 protosemitic lettersz Arabic has all 29. The difference betweeen Arabic and the other creoles and Pidgin is the same as that between Latin and pig latin or italian. "phoenician" is an Arabic dialect continuum, not only that, it is pidgin. It's simplified to the point of stupidity, anyone with a basic knowledge of Arabic would see this evidently clear. What happened was, Arabic handicapped "scholars" saw the equivalent of scottish twitter spelling, with added mumbling by way of phonemic mergers (22 letters not 29) and thought themselves seeing a different language.
@@ranro7371 The best answer I have is we don't really know since it happened so long ago. But Arabic is the best, most eloquent and coherent language spoken by the sons of Shem.
what nonsense you are talking. the phoenicians existed long before the arabs had any culture or literature at all. yoiu have no idea about what you are talking and probably a typical islamic understanding of history. @@ranro7371
1/ There are opinions, and there are factual statements. I appreciate your opinions. Here is a factual statement. The Arabic language is the oldest continually spoken language in the world, back. In the 6th Century, only three languages had scripts and linguistics rich enough to have poetry. Those were Ancient Greek, Chinese, And Arabic. Of them, only Arabic exists as it did back then. Chinese script has no bearing on the language, which is why it is used by several languages, Ancient Greek has been standardized, only Arabic remains as the oldest continually spoken language whose speakers can read what was said 1500 years ago with the same fluency as anything written today. Languages degenerate as time passes by, old english lost its case endings, its genders, etc, back at a time when old english and the rest of the european vernaculars had no written script, entire encyclopedias were written in Arabic, but this isn't even the strangest part, what's truly strange is how is it so Perfect. There is no other language quite like Arabic, to begin with, it appears in history with the Qur'an, from the Qur'an and by analysing the Qur'an, the grammatical rules which govern the Arabic languag ewere extracted, this is in itself a linguistic miracle seeing as how there had to have been a mathematical exactness to have a concordance of the type of which that would allow rules to be established, no other colloraly exist in any other language, not only that the fact of the matter is, the script itsef appears for the first time with it, and the script in itself is a miracle as it simply should not exist. I shall elaborate. Arabic is the only corollary to proto-semitic, infact the whole semitic classification is nonsensical for anyone with a somewhat functioning mass between their ears. hebrew, aramaic, rest of madeup dialect continua only have 22 letters of the 29 protosemitic lettersz Arabic has all 29. The difference betweeen Arabic and the other creoles and Pidgin is the same as that between Latin and pig latin or italian. Language; When you look at the actual linguistics, you'll find that many were puzzled by the opposite, that is, how the other "semetic" (why in quotes will be revealed later) languages were more "evolved" than Arabic, while Arabic had archaic features, not only archaic compared to bibilical Hebrew, Ethiopic, "Aramaic" contemporary "semetic" languages, but even archaic compared to languages from ancient antiquity; Ugaritic, Akkadain. What is meant here by Archaic is not what most readers think, it is Archaic not in the sense that it is simple, but rather that it is complex (think Latin to pig Latin or Italian or Old English, which had genders and case endings to modern English), not only grammatically, but also phonetically; All the so called semitic languages are supposed to have evolved from protosemetic, the Alphabet for protosemitic is that of the so called Ancient South Arabian (which interestingly corresponds with the traditional Arabic origins account) and has 28 Phonemes. Arabic has 28 phonemes. Hebrew has 22, same as Aramaic, and other "semitic" languages. Now pause for a second and think about it, how come Arabic, a language that is supposed to have come so late has the same number of letters as a language that supposedly predates it by over a millennium (Musnad script ~1300 BCE). Not only is the glossary of phonemes more diverse than any other semitic language, but the grammar is more complex, containing more cases and retains what's linguists noted for its antiquity, broken plurals. Indeed, a linguist has once noted that if one were to take everything we know about languages and how they develop, Arabic is older than Akkadian (~2500 BCE). The real miracle of the Quran, the Arabic language. The thing the half educated don't know about is that Quranic Arabic is linguistically older than Akkadian. Both derive from "proto-semitic:, protosemitic has 29 letters, the same as Arabic meanwhile Akkadian underwent phonemic mergers To show the relation of Arabic to other "semitic" languages, see below Classical Arabic has largest phonemic inventories among semitic languages. It has 28 consonants (29 with Hamza) and 6 vowels (3 short and 3 long). Some of these sounds are rare or absent in other semitic languages. For example, - Classical Arabic has two pharyngeal consonants /ʕ/ (ع) and /ħ/ (ح), which are produced by constricting the pharynx (the back part of the throat). These sounds are found only in some semitic languages (such as Hebrew and Amharic), but not in others (such as Akkadian and Aramaic). - Classical Arabic has two emphatic consonants /sˤ/ (ص) and /dˤ/ (ض), which are produced by lowering the larynx (the voice box) and raising the back of the tongue. These sounds are found only in some semitic languages (such as Hebrew and Amharic), but not in others (such as Akkadian and Aramaic). - Classical Arabic has two uvular consonants /q/ (ق) and /χ/ (خ), which are produced by retracting the tongue to the uvula (the small fleshy projection at the back of the soft palate). These sounds are found only in some semitic languages (such as Hebrew and Amharic), but not in others (such as Akkadian and Aramaic). - Classical Arabic has two glottal consonants /ʔ/ (ء) and /h/ (ه), which are produced by opening and closing the glottis (the space between the vocal cords). These sounds are found in most semitic languages, but not in all of them. For example, Akkadian has lost the glottal stop /ʔ/, while Aramaic has lost both the glottal stop and the glottal fricative /h/. - Classical Arabic has six vowel phonemes /a/, /i/, /u/, /aː/, /iː/, /uː/, which can be short or long. These vowels are found in most semitic languages, but not in all of them. For example, Akkadian has only three vowel phonemes /a/, /i/, /u/, which can be short or long, while Aramaic has only two vowel phonemes /a/ and /i/, which can be short or long. To show the relation of Arabic to other "semitic" languages, see below This is the protosemitic script, which contains the entirety of the phonemic inventory of semitic languages, its only 1:1 equivalent is Arabic, the rest dropped or mumbled the phonemes 𐩠 𐩡 𐩢 𐩣 𐩤 𐩥 𐩦 𐩧 𐩨 𐩩 𐩪 𐩫 𐩬 𐩭 𐩮 𐩰 𐩱 𐩲 𐩳 𐩴 𐩵 𐩶 𐩷 𐩸 𐩹 𐩺 𐩻 𐩼 Arabic ا ب ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ك ل م ن ه و ي A b t ṯ j h kh d ḏ r z s sh ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ ʿ ġ f q k l m n h w y Hhbrew א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ל מ נ ס ע פ צ ק ר ש ת Merged phonemes in hebrew and aramaic: ح, خ (h, kh) merged into only kh consonant remain س, ش (s, sh) merged into only Shin consonant remaining ط, ظ (ṭ/teth, ẓ) merged into only ṭ/teth consonant remaining ص, ض (ṣ, ḍ/Tsad ) merged into only ḍ/Tsad consonant remaining ع, غ (3'ayn, Ghayn) merged into a reducted ayin consonant remaining ت, ث (t/taw, th) merged into only t/taw consonant remaining |Classical Arabic | 28 consonants, 29 with Hamza and 6 vowels; some consonants are emphatic or pharyngealized; some vowels are marked with diacritics | Complex system of word formation based on roots and patterns; roots are sequences of consonants that carry the basic meaning of a word; patterns are sequences of vowels and affixes that modify the meaning and function of a word | Flexible word order, but VSO is most common; SVO is also possible; subject and object are marked by case endings (-u for nominative, -a for accusative, -i for genitive); verb agrees with subject in person, number, and gender; verb has different forms for different moods and aspects | | Akkadian | 22 consonants and 3 vowels; some consonants are glottalized or palatalized; vowels are not marked | Similar system, but with different roots and patterns; some roots have more than three consonants; some patterns have infixes or reduplication | Fixed word order of SVO; subject and object are not marked by case endings, but by prepositions or word order; verb agrees with subject in person, number, and gender; verb has different forms for different tenses and aspects | | Aramaic | 22 consonants and 3 vowels (later variants have more); no emphatic or pharyngealized consonants (except in some dialects); vowels are not marked (except in later variants such as Syriac) | Simple system of word formation based on prefixes and suffixes; some roots or patterns exist, but are less productive than in Arabic or Akkadian | "Semitic" is just mumbled Arabic, really. Imagine English with a third of its letters removed and simplified grammar. That's Aramaic, Hebrew, etc. For example, combine T and D into just T; there's no need to have 2 letters. The same goes for i, e, y - they should all be just y from now on, etc., etc. Arabic is the only corollary to proto-Semitic. In fact, the whole classification of Semitic languages is nonsensical for anyone with a somewhat functioning brain. Hebrew, Aramaic, and the rest of these made-up dialect continua only have 22 letters out of the 29 proto-Semitic letters. Arabic has all 29. The difference between Arabic and the other creoles and Pidgin is the same as the difference between Latin and pig Latin or Italian. "Phoenician" is an Arabic dialect continuum, and not only that, it is pidgin. It is simplified to the point of stupidity. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Arabic would see this clearly. What happened was that Arabic handicapped "scholars" saw the equivalent of Scottish Twitter spelling, with added mumbling due to phonemic mergers (22 letters, not 29), and mistakenly thought they were seeing a different language."
Finally, let's look at a more complex sentence: The letter was written with a pen. How would you say it in different Semitic languages? ## The letter was written with a pen Arabic: كُتِبَتِ الرِّسَالَةُ بِالقَلَمِ kutiba-t al-risāla-t-u bi-l-qalam-i Proto-Semitic: *kutiba-t ʔal-risāla-t-u bi-l-qalam-i Hebrew: המכתב נכתב בעט ha-michtav niktav ba-et Akkadian: šipram šapāru bēlum Egyptian: sḏm.n.f p-ẖry m rnp.t Berber: tturra-t tibratin s uccen In the examples Arabic and Proto-Semitic have the same word order (verb-subject-object), the same passive voice marker (-t-), the same definite article (al-), and the same preposition (bi-). Hebrew has changed the word order (subject-verb-object), lost the passive voice marker, changed the definite article (ha-) and the preposition (ba-). Akkadian has changed the word order (object-subject-verb), lost the passive voice marker, changed the definite article (-um) and the preposition (bēlum). These examples show that classical Arabic has more consonants and vowels than other semitic languages, and that it preserves some sounds that were lost or changed in other semitic languages. This means that classical Arabic can encode more information in a given unit of speech than other semitic languages, and that it is closer to the original sound system of protosemitic., we can see that classical Arabic has more grammatical features than the other languages, such as case endings, mood endings, and root and pattern system. These features make classical Arabic more expressive and precise than the other languages, as it can convey more information and nuances in a single word or phrase. Classical Arabic is also more flexible than the other languages, as it can use different word orders and verb forms to emphasize different aspects of the sentence. Classical Arabic is therefore older and more original than the other languages. "Semitic" is just mumbled Arabic, really. Imagine English with a third of its letters removed and simplified grammar. That's Aramaic, Hebrew, etc. For example, combine T and D into just T; there's no need to have 2 letters. The same goes for i, e, y - they should all be just y from now on, etc., etc. Arabic is the only corollary to proto-Semitic. In fact, the whole classification of Semitic languages is nonsensical for anyone with a somewhat functioning brain. Hebrew, Aramaic, and the rest of these made-up dialect continua only have 22 letters out of the 29 proto-Semitic letters. Arabic has all 29. The difference between Arabic and the other creoles and Pidgin is the same as the difference between Latin and pig Latin or Italian. "Phoenician" is an Arabic dialect continuum, and not only that, it is pidgin. It is simplified to the point of stupidity. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Arabic would see this clearly. What happened was that Arabic handicapped "scholars" saw the equivalent of Scottish Twitter spelling, with added mumbling due to phonemic mergers (22 letters, not 29), and mistakenly thought they were seeing a different language." The Aramaic word for God is Alaha. It's the word Isa PBUH (jesus as his name is often misspelled due to lack of the ayin sound in greek which was rendered to iesous coupling the nearest sound to ayin, same letter found in 'iraq' , which sound entirely different in Arabic form 'iran' in Arabic, with the -ous greek suffix that greeks typically add to their names 'herodotOUS and later mumbled into a j) Sounds familiar? Written without the confusing vowels it is A-L-H ܐ ܠܗܐ (alap-lamed-he) as found in found in Targum or in Tanakh (Danel, Ezra), Syriac Aramaic (Peshitta) adducted from the Arabic original of which aramaic is a dialect continuum of A-L-L-H (Aleph-Lam-Lam-Ha). Matter of fact that all this, and the knowledge needed for deciphering ancient texts and the complexity all of it was derived from the Qur'an, it was by analysing the syntactic structure of the Quran that the Arabic root system was developed, first attested to in Kitab Al-Ayin, the first intralanguage dictionary of its kind, preceding the Oxford English dictionary by 800 years, that the concept of Arabic root was developed and later co-opted into "semitic root" that the ancient scripts were deciphered, they quite literally copy pasted the entirey of Arabic root. hebrew had been dead, and so were all the other dialects of Arabic until being "revived" in a frankensteinian fashion in the 18th, 19th centuries. The whole region spoke basically the same language, mumbled dialect continuums spread about, and Arabic is the oldest form from which all these dialects branched off. As time passed, the language became more degenerate and then the Quran appears with the oldest form possible of the language thousands of years later It is why the Arabs back then were challenged to produce 10 verses similar, and they couldnt. People think it's a miracle becau'e they couldnt do it, but I think the miracle is the language itself, they had never spoken Arabic, nor has any other language before or since had this mathematical precision behind it. And I quite literally mean, mathematical.
Now how is it that the Qur'an came thousands of yeara later in an alphabet that had never been recorded before and in the highest form the language had ever taken and the language is lexically, syntactically, phonemically and semantically older than the oldest recorded writing, infact, that writing appears to have been a simplified version of it, and not only that, but it would be the equivalent of the greatest works of any particular language all appearing in one book that in a perfect script and in the highest form the language could ever take, so high infact it is theoretically not possible to surpass it all in a script that had never been recorded before and so the enlightenment of mankind from barbarism and savagery began and age of reason and rationality was born from its study God did bring down the Qur’an, Mohamed is his Messenger.
I speak both Hebrew and Yiddish (and am learning Ladino) - but Yiddish is my first language (I think in it) - and we have a Yiddish-only rule here at home. Front door closes, no more English. As a kid, I lived in Birobidzhan, USSR - the Soviets simplified the Hebrew/Yiddish alefbeis - no final letters, no Hebrew-only letters like Veis, Tov and Sov, and all words from Hebrew were spelled phonetically. All books, the newspaper Birobidzhaner Shtern, and the magazine Sovetish Hejmland were printed using the Soviet orthography. Not going to lie, it was a lot easier to read! LOL When the USSR collapsed, that orthography was dropped. My daughter-in-law is from Corfu, from a family that still speaks Ladino as their first language (my Yiddish-speaking son & her have it mandated in their K'suveh that their kids will speak Yiddish and Ladino, THEN learn Hebrew later (they live in Israel). ANYHOW... they write Ladino with another modified Hebrew alefbeis that's halfway between Hebrew and Yiddish - though apparently that's only common in Israel now, as in Greece, Turkey, Bosnia, etc. they use Roman letters (apparently the Turks mandated they switch).
This is very interesting to read, thanks. I did not imagine that there would still be people speaking Ladino in Corfu. Which letters are the Hebrew-only letters that you mention?
Lol we have over a thousand years worth of Judeo-German or Yiddish texts, but the Soviets decided it was best to change it 😅 (wasn't it they who also decided jews would be best apart and needing shunting off to the extreme edge of the Russian far east, (next to freaking China, and with wild Tigers roaming around, yup perfect.) to build that travesty of a place, mostly populated by goyim and less than 10% Jews? I think I saw a documentary, like streets named Sholem aleichem st, or some such nonsense 🤔 And wow big surprise, after their inevitable fall it was changed back lmfao 🤣 typically Russian
Well, Ladino is descended from Old Spanish, so it should use the Latin alphabet. On the other hand, Yiddish is descended from Middle High German and for some reason uses the Hebrew alphabet (seemingly the hardest part of Yiddish is the alphabet). I know there are transliterations of Yiddish, but its spelling system is a bit odd; the other day, I learned that the transliterated version of Yiddish for "for example" is "tsum bayshpil", which sounds exactly like German "zum Beispiel", but is spelled very oddly.
Wow, a real jew from Birobidzhan! As a Russian I always thought "jewish autonomous oblast" was a USSR gov joke and it had no jews in it. I even lived not that far away, in Amur oblast. Sadly the region is not very known nowadays and the people are leaving it for better places.
If in Greece, has there been any interaction with romanyote/yevanitika and if so how is it in comparison to ladino, yiddish, hebrew, etc.? Is the Hebrew abjad used, is the Hellenic alphabet used, or is the Latin script still used the same as you mentioned above?
as a native hebrew speaker who grew up rarely writing and had to learn individual words at a later age, i came up with a few strategies for these irregularities (which are valid at least in native hebrew words) 1) alef/ayin (word-initially or medially): unfortunately, this one is guesswork. try alef though, it's slightly more common 2) alef/ayin/he (word-finally): he is waaay more common than alef. word-final alef is usually only found when it is part of the root or in aramaic loanwords. word-final ayin makes an extra /a/ sound after the final vowel, so unless the final vowel is /a/, you can tell if it's an ayin. this way you can differentiate between /ho'dia/ and /hoda'ja/ 3) soft bet/vav: if /v/ appears word-initially, it's written with a vav. if it appears word-finally, it's probably a bet 4) hard kaf/kuf: if /k/ appears word-finally, it's written with a kuf (except some arabic loanwords and some acronyms) 5) soft kaf/khet: if /x/ appears word-initially, it's written with a khet. also, word-final khet adds an /a/ before it (like ayin). this way, you can differentiate between /o'reax/ and /'orex/ 6) samekh/sin: samekh is much more common. if you have to guess, guess samekh 7) tet/tav: mostly guesswork, but affixes with /t/ are written with tav. the only case in which /t/ in an affix is written with a tet is in special cases in the hitpa'el stem in which tav becomes tet it's hellish, but you learn to get by :) hope this helps!
It's just mumbled Arabic, really. Imagine English with a third of its letters removed, and simplified grammar. Thats hebrew. For example, combine T,D into just T no need to have 2 letters. Same for i, e, y they all should be just y from now on, etc etc. "
8) In words loaned from foreign languages: ת replaces "th", ט replaces "t". In those loaned words, "k" is spelled mostly with ק and "s" is spelled replaced by ס (samekh). That is why you have תאטרון (theatre), or מתמטיקה (mathematics), or סטודנט (student). 9) It is impossible for "P" to appear at the end of an original Hebrew word, so you cannot have "peh sofit". In the rare loaned words, where P appears at the end, regular "peh" is written instead: טופ, פופ etc.
Finnish is almost 100% phonetic, only changing now with young peoples dialectization, yet normal official Finnish writing is a joy since you can speak and write correctly just after learning each letter sound
You are describing phonetic orthography. Polish language also has phonetic orthography. English language obviously does not - its spelling is bad joke.
4:00: That box on the left is hillarious! For those not in the know, it's part of a standard form employees in Israel have to fill in every year for tax purposes, and this particular box has such convoluted and unclear terminology that nobody really knows how to fill it in correctly. A great illustration!
As a native Hebrew speaker, I actually like this language a lot, even the dumb writing system. The nikkud is actually an integral part of the writing system, we just usually don't write it and keep it hidden. As such, there are a lot of grammar rules that almost no native speakers know, some of which will probably explain a few examples from your video. My actual hate for the Hebrew language comes from the gender part. I have never seen such harsh grammatical gender, it's genuinely the worst. A bunch of native speakers make a lot of mistakes in it as well. It's still a fascinating language in my opinion. I really enjoyed the video, thanks!
One of the most impressive feats I ever saw in language was when my Hebrew professor wrote a long sentence out on the blackboard and then went back to the beginning and added in all the points! I could never get past writing one letter then pointing it and moving on to the next letter. 😢
הטעויות הכי נפוצות שראיתי בעברית הן. "אני יעשה" "במקום אני אעשה", "שלושה נקבות" "במקום שלוש נקבות", הניקוד אף פעם לא מוסבר/מבוטא. וכמעט כל ישראלי ורוסי מתבלבלים בביטוי האותיות א' ו-ע'.
i'd laugh in three-gendered german, but not only is that a bit macabre, you also could easily defeat me be throwing the word Nutella at me.. or Joghurt.. or Kartoffel.. or Butter..
If this makes you feel better, at least in Sephardic Hebrew, the letter bag doesn't make the /v/ sound (unless it's the Greek Sephardic dialect), so it's either /o~u/ or /w/. And the letter Ayin makes the /ŋ/ sound for some reason. The Sephardic dialect from North Africa, and some regions next to Israel are more conservative though, and the letters Gimmel, Daleth, and Tav have their two pronunciations g~ɣ, d~ð, t~θ respectively.
When I started learning hebrew I expected a very easy writing system, because I thought surely they would reform the writing system so it would be easier for all the people from different linguistic backgrounds needing to learn the language. Boy was I wrong. It's a shame because it was a great opportunity. Once you have millions of books written in it, it's very hard to reform.
@@memeboi6017 Because every Sabbath and Jewish holiday, religious Jews in synagogues read Torah from a parchment scroll. Those scrolls to be kosher (for the synagogal reading) have to be written by hand, and get copied letter by letter from a prior scroll. Many religious Jews believe there's a mystical reason for letters to be written the way they are, including the final letters.
@@olterigo Then you'd think they'd go the Arabic route and just choose the most conservative pronunciation (that sounds (more or less) the way the language sounded when Torah was written) as the basis for the standard language.
@@2712animefreak I agree with you in general, but in Eastern European Orthodox Judaism the reality is that sometimes tradition/custom becomes the rule and you need a very authoritative rabbi to change it back to what it originally is supposed to be. That's why some really religious Jews, still dress like their ancestors 10 generations ago - the customary outfits became "holy" if you will (plus they keep them different from the rest of the society).
This was kind of the point when us Turks switched to Latin alphabet because the Arabic abjad gave Turkish the same problems and we have much more vowels in our words. Well at that time, I wouldn't think of any other writing system could have been used for Hebrew, thinking about the political climate of the era.
Well, it's my understanding that Turkish phonology is more suited to the Latin alphabet. Aside from ı /ɯ/, all the sounds in Turkish occur in common Indo-European languages. Though, I do appreciate that Azerbaijani distinguishes between e /e/ and ə /æ/, where Turkish uses e for both sounds.
@@ghenulo Well, Uyghur, Kazakh (in PRC) and Kyrgyz (in PRC) use Arabic script but the system is a proper alphabet. The Ottoman system was indeed problematic, but Kemal decided to westernize the country. Probably, if the Ottoman system was still around, it would be heavily modified like the Uyghur system.
I taught myself the Hebrew alphabet teaching myself some Yiddish, which I can sort of read, mostly because it sounds like German, though by painstakingly sounding it out. Yiddish, at least with the standard sort of spelling, fixes most of the problems you talk about. It writes *all* the vowels. There's only one t, k , s, etc., for "native" word at lest; words from Hebrew are spelled like Hebrew. My problem is too many characters look alike, daled looks resh, vov looks like zayin looks like final nun, bet looks like kaf, mem looks like samech, etc. The differences are just a little tick, or a square vs. rounded corner, which depending on the font and size of text can be very hard to see. And for someone like me who can't really read, but sounds things out letter by letter, it's infuriating not being able to tell the letters apart.
I've been playing around with the new Yiddish course on Duolingo, and I've dabbled in Hebrew, it does seem much easier to read Yiddish than Hebrew. I will try to conquer Hebrew again someday, but right now I am having a lot of fun with Yiddish.
Wow kudos to you dude. I kinda agree, I mean designation helps, so knowing e.g Alef is A and Ayin is an E makes things much simpler from the outset. The problem with Yiddish is the letter combos are kinda weird to English speakers. So as in say the word (T)Chepper meaning to bother or annoy, the spelling is Tes Shiyen (and you have to know its somehow shiyen not a siyen, or I guess they'd use samech??) to someone self taught (and without nikkud help) it was curious adaptation from the Hebrew to have to master
My grandfather and father spoke Yiddish , but couldn't read or write it.Recall my dad saying if you can speak German,you can learn Yiddish.My dad was German and spoke it with a Berliner accent.
Very funny. I am a Hebrew teacher to American students and I think you are hilarious. Students do figure out somewhat how to read aloud, but it comes from intensive exposure. However, having to listen to them read aloud or reading their compositions require tons of patience and compassion. The more you read the better you will become at spelling without nikud.
There is Th sound in Ancient hebrew like in English but not in Arabic nobody use it but it better ti start sound Dalet without Dagesh like MoTHer faTHer real Tav without dagesh not from Ashkenuses THink or THanks Gimel without dagesh like Turkish hard G Reply
as someone learning Hebrew, I want you to continue making more vids about the nuances of Hebrew because your rants make it stick! thanks. can you differentiate the sounds and use of tet versus tav and Chet vs qof vs kaf
For best understanding of Hebrew writing/reading - best to understand concept of משקל and בניין - and of course roots. How actually words are build. Once you get it everything will be way clearer. Grammar is very important tool. That it would be natural to understand and remember meaning of stuff like: לִכְתוֹב, כָּתַבָה, כִּתִיבָה, מִכְתָב, כַתָב
No I believe for proper analysis one NEEDS to be able to isolate the Shoresh, if you can extract the 3 letter root it becomes much easier to understand a word and it's pronounciation and usage. That's how we were taught as little kids, (Yiddish however was never taught, just spoken, so learning to read fluently was much harder.)
To your last request: ט and ת both just make a /t/ sound nowadays. Historically, one of them made the /th/ sound (way back in the Iron Age, that was the ט, which is why the Greek theta still makes that sound, but more recently it was the ת, which further shifted to /s/ in Yiddish. You sometimes get /th/ translitterated as ת or 'ת in Hebrew today. The letter ק makes the /k/ sound, and the letter ח makes a so-called "hard h" (like the French kh, Spanish and Russian x, German ch, as in "Bach"), while כ can make both sounds (always a /k/ at the start of a word, except in a couple of relatively recent loanwords from Greek; always a hard h when it's in its word-final forn, ך). If you have nikkud, a /k/ will always appear as כּ, with that dot in the middle. Now, historically, those were actually different sound qualities. Most Arabic dialects still preserve the distinction between the sound of a quf (note the q in the transliteration) and a kaf, and the hard h of ח is meant to be glottal, not velar, as in כ, again, a difference still heard in Arabic, but only preserved in very few Modern Hebrew sub-dialects.
"semitic" is just mumbled Arabic, really. Imagine English with a third of its letters removed, and simplified grammar. Thats Aramaic, hebrew, etc. For example, combine T,D into just T no need to have 2 letters. Same for i, e, y they all should be just y from now on, etc etc. Arabic is the only corollary to proto-semitic, infact the whole semitic classification is nonsensical for anyone with a somewhat functioning mass between their ears. hebrew, aramaic, rest of madeup dialect continua only have 22 letters of the 29 protosemitic lettersz Arabic has all 29. The difference betweeen Arabic and the other creoles and Pidgin is the same as that between Latin and pig latin or italian. "phoenician" is an Arabic dialect continuum, not only that, it is pidgin. It's simplified to the point of stupidity, anyone with a basic knowledge of Arabic would see this evidently clear. What happened was, Arabic handicapped "scholars" saw the equivalent of scottish twitter spelling, with added mumbling by way of phonemic mergers (22 letters not 29) and thought themselves seeing a different language.
The main advantage of a single letter having 2 sounds is that the sound might change based on the conjugation of the word. Take כתבתי/katavti/ (I was writing) and אכתוב/eχtov/ (I will write). In one כ makes a k sound and in the other כ makes a h sound. When reading you will immediately recognize they are both of the root כ.ת.ב, (writing)
You make it sound so difficult, while it really isn't. Not worse, for instance, than Polish with which I grew up at home, while using Hebrew all around. BTW, a famous Hebrew linguist, Uzi Ornan dared to mention that modern Hebrew should change its alphabet to the Latin one. He was opposed by all...
I saw a video about the Tibetan alphabet... turns out it was pretty good when it was invented, but they kept the same alphabet and spelling across hundreds of years of linguistic drift, so now it's very unwieldy.
An equally confusing system existed among some Tibetan-Buddhist Manchus about 200-300 years ago, who transcribed Tibetan sutras in a way that roughly stands halfway between how it is originally spelled and how it was spoken around Lhasa at the time. For example, the word _dbus_ is pronounced like a German ü now, but they wrote it as _us_ in Manchu letters and pronounced it _ui._
As someone who has learnt Biblical Hebrew for my degree many years ago I feel the pain lol. I don't know Arabic at all but I also learnt Syriac for my degree and that was far worse! Half the letters were nothing but blobs until I got used to them and even worse I had to learn more than one script depending on the dialect of the text! Still, I really enjoyed learning it and it was amazing how easy it was after one or two glasses of sherry lol.
I was under the impression that biblical hebrew was far more confusing in respect to reading comprehension and relies heavily on memorization because so many of the words have a dozen or more literal translations or uses and other reasons. My grandparents were insistent that I learned Yiddish and German as a child
Thankfully it wasn't really as bad as that because although many of the words have different meanings, and different shades of meaning, the context was a good guide.@@sidvicious6505
The letters alef and ayin have been pronounced as consonants for 1500 years of Iraqi, Moroccan, and Yemeni liturgical Hebrew. Specifically, as a voiceless glottal stop and a voiced pharyngeal fricative, respectively. Only in the very recent and heavily Europeanized (Yiddish-and Ladino-influenced) Modern Israeli Hebrew have these two letters come to represent vowel-only sounds.
Однажды на уроке иврита моя подруга вместо неба начитала наркотики (самим вместо шамаим), и это просто постоянно. У меня за плечами 9 лет изучения языка в школе и сдан внутренний школьный экзамен на пятерку, но я все ещё не решаюсь прочитать хоть что-нибудь на иврите. Хотя, будем честны, на слух я его тоже сейчас вряд-ли пойму - все позабыла
Err dude, I'm not sure exactly HOW he did that because from my memory they have 2 completely different letters. Yes, a shiyen can be a Siyen, but drugs/Samim is spelled with a Samech and heaven/Shamayim is a Shiyen or Shin not a Siyen/sin 😉 of course I didn't learn in Cyrillic alphabet so perhaps that's the issue??
@@ABritInNY no, she just misspelled it. Because she forgot that she already know this word, so she tried her best an improvised. שמים is sky, but if you don't know how exactly read it, you can read it with sound s, not sh. And without symbols it is difficult to read it with "...aim", easier to "...im". So that's how shamaim (שמים) turned into samim(סמים)
You left out the Hebrew words for shovel and era - את and עת. את - proposition את - you (female) את - shovel עת - era/period/time עט - pen All, except the second one, are pronounced more or less the same as "ett" (этт)
I’m glad you clarified that you are speaking about modern Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew is perfect and extremely fun and beautiful to find double meanings of words. Also in Biblical Hebrew you don’t get the duplicate letters.
That’s true. In Biblical Hebrew, ט is not just a “T”. Its a “T” pronounced with your tongue in between your tongue. And ח, it is not a hard “H”. It is the soft “H” with air coming from your vocal cord. The letter ר should just be pronounced as like we normally say the letter “R”. But idk why Modern Hebrew actually made a number of letters having redundant sounds 😢
As a native Arabic speaker i recently started learning Hebrew and it's crazy how its alphabet makes a lot of sense. ט=ط , ת=ت , ק=ق, צ=ص כ=ک ע=ع as everyone said these letters have lost its original pronunciation in modern Hebrew. really interesting things
If I remember correctly, the reason אמא and אבא have an א at the end is because they were taken from aramaic, where א at the end acts as the definite article "the". So it's kinda fun seeing remnants of other languages in the language
Thank you so much for this video! Decade after decade, I have started at odd moments making yet another attempt at overcoming the first hurdle towards learning Hebrew, the fact that shin is the only letter I can recognise, while most of the rest fall into three classes, with any letter possibly being any other letter in the same class. You have now saved me from wasting hours adding up to days trying to overcome my inability, because it would be f*@/ing pointless! The second step would be just as hopeless as the first! As for French, I spent a lot more time on failing, because of the seemingly familiar easily distinguishable letters, but quickly discovered the two principle rules of the language: 1. The vowels can't be pronounced. 2. The consonants mustn't be pronounced. And now I must stop, because my blood pressure is rising, too.
Most of your criticism of hebrew applies to persian as well lol S = س ث ص T = ط ت Z = ز ذ ض ظ And a few more options lol Short vowels are not written causing confusion We also use A ا (alef) for placeholder of short or long vowels Our vav (we also call it that) is also the word for O, U and V (we dont have W waw sound) I think the same spunding letters is useful cause its different sounding in arabic and it means different word Asās is how we say اثاث and اساس But they mean different things so when qritten it can help differentiate it
Its same with Arabic btw but there are very subtle differences a native would be able to tell. (For example with the ث , u bring ur tongue out, unlike س ) Idk if this is the case with Farsi
14:16 French writing system is actually pretty easy at least it haves consistent rules unlike English I learned it by singing songs from Notre Dame De Paris
So much of what is said here reflects the poster's lack of knowledge of Hebrew's history. I, too, got the erroneous education of what sounds the letters make* that he repeats here, but having since learned how the letters originally sounded, I don't find the lettering so bizarre. I was amused to see shakshuka thrown in there at 15:50. 😉 *For example, he doesn't (& in my childhood I didn't) know that just as with the ב and the פ, the ג, the ד, and the ת have different sounds depending on whether they have an emphasis dot (a _dagesh_ ) in them. But in practice these were lost in the last few centuries of exile (except in some Arabic and Yemenite communities).
9:40 - Seemingly a little known fact: When Arabic names/words are transliterated into Hebrew, ح (H) is transliterated into just ח (KH), and ח' actually means خ (kh), because that's the Mizrahi pronounciation. And these do actually exist - ד' for some things, ת' like for "Houthis" (חות'ים, which people turn into חותים - Khootim), ח' for any time the arabic خ exists, and... Well, ע' is the reason that غزة (Gaza) is ע'זה -> עזה.
11:00 there is also the word for "Shovel" which is אֵת (et) as well Another really cool example is the story of שֶׁלָמָה שְׁלֹמֹה שַׂלְמָה שְׁלֵמָה שִׁלֵּמָה but that's for really advanced speakers
Earlier "gimel" was both [g] and [غ], "dalet" was [d] and [ð], "tav" was [t] and [θ]. Nowadays this distinction still exists in Syriac dialects and in Arabic, but not in Hebrew.
Can't speak to the gimel situation since [g] doesn't exist in all dialects, and is always represented by different letters, but I can confirm as an Arabic speaker that د [d] (daal) and ذ [ð] (thaal) exhibit this, as well as ت [t] (taa') and ث [θ] (thaa') As far as [g], my native Egyptian has that represented by ج (jeem), which in MSA makes a [dʒ] sound. Some will represented by a ق (qaaf), which in MSA is a [q] and in Egyptian is a [ʔ]۔The velar fricative [ɣ] (or something similar) is always represented by غ (ghain) though
@@largefam3109That’s true. Though the Arabic alifbaa didn’t have separate letters for each pronunciation at the very beginning. For example, the letter pronounced [θ] was just the same letter as [t]. If I remember correctly, [b] and [n] were also represented by that letter. It seems like in the Hebrew alphabet they did not end up adding new letters to separate one sound from another, instead they differentiated them with nikkud.
@@aurasphere01 Yeah, sounds about right. Older versions of the Arabic script didn't have dots, so ت، ث، ب، ن (t, th, b, n) would look identical (ن would as well at the beginning/midle of a word)
I am less concerned about these annoyances, my personal problem is that after more than 20 years of speaking Hebrew I still can't read it since all the letters looks the same to me 🤕For example, it is near to impossible to differentiate between the vav and nun in most of the modern fonts, and usually it also extends to gimel and zain as well. You really have to double check all these barely visible glyph details, - but in many fonts the designers consciously make them almost unrecognizable. The same is with bet and kaf (not mentioning that nun, gimel and zain are sometimes getting almost as fat as bet or kaf), mem and pei and samekh (sometime looking just indistinguishable from bet 😩) - I probably can go further but these are the most obvious cases. I don't really blame the language here - I blame the font designers, they just have to pull their heads out of their asses and admit that the modern Hebrew fonts are result of misuse of Latin typography in a totally foreign script system, that the Blackletter typing system is not only not applicable to Hebrew, it is not used even in the Western typography for the last century, the last one that used it were Nazis, but even they abandoned it by 1944 - but the modern Hebrew typography is still using Blackletter-inspired fonts as the base for the typing system.
Thanks for the video. As a native speaker, you don't really get to think about those things. This explains why so many foreigners and new olim have trouble grasping writing and spelling. Like you said, some words feel as if they're constructed in a way that there's no logic behind the spelling, and all you can do really is memorize. I'm surprised you didn't mention the confusion with the letter ח when it comes at the end of a word and pronounced as "ach" instead, in words such as תפוח, בטוח, רוקח etc.. It's easy to apply once you understand it, but extremely unintuitive for new learners. Also, letters ט and ת have a bit of nuance to them that I noticed when they're used in words that are borrowed from foreign languages (mainly english). Usually if there's "th", in Hebrew it'll be transcribed as ת While "t" is exclusively ט Theater>>תאטרון Television>>טלוויזיה
As a French native speaker I couldn’t watch this video and not say anything. First, thanks for these 15 minutes of fun. I actually tried to learn Hebrew once and I quite enjoyed it to be honest, even with its writing complexity. Maybe that’s because my own language is worse ^^. As for the Arabic abjad, I think it evolved from Palmyrene or Syriac script (themselves coming from Aramaic/Hebrew script) but it created more letters by adding different dots above or under the writing line in order to differentiate the phonemes. So it has been naturally adapted to the language and thus, it makes more sense in the phonographic logic. Modern Hebrew however, lost some original Ancient Hebrew sounds (like the ע which lost its glottal characteristic /ʔ/, but still existing in Arabic) and characters like כ /k/ and ק /q/ (or ח /ħ/ and כ /x/) were actually not pronounced exactly the same in ancient time. As for the use in Modern Hebrew, I think it still makes sense to keep on using these characters for different reasons. Many roots might be understandable thanks to these characters, even if the pronunciation is distant. Also, it might help read classics (like Ancient Hebrew) and get closer to its understanding. If you turn the whole system into a 100% phonetic script, you might lose a lot of written comprehension and lexical or etymological connections. And finally, a spoken language always evolves with time. So you might find it cool to use a phonetic spelling at some point but in few generations, the pronunciation might have evolved again so your ‘new’ spelling will eventually become outdated one day anyway.
As a friend and student of ancient Near Eastern languages I have to agree with you. If only we pronounced, or _knew how to_ pronounce, the sounds correctly in the academia. Alas, they are dead languages, so nobody cares just for the anality of it which makes it difficult for us who would thrive on said level of anality......
If those beautitful pharyngeals and emphatics were pronounced as they used to be, a lot (if not most) of all this mess would've been nonexistent. And, in my own and private opinion, Hebrew language with those phonemes just sounds WAY better to my ears
This is fascinating. Are you familiar with Devanagari? Used for Sanskrit, Hindi, and other Indian languages. It's just gorgeous. Not just how it looks, but how it works. It's consistent and logical, and the order of letters is even based on how they're made in the mouth. If you can read it, you can say it.
Salam, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace. In The Name Of God, Most Compassionate, Most Gracious. It was We who revealed the Torah (to Moses); therein was guidance and light. By its standard have been judged the Jews, by the Prophet who bowed (as in Islam) to Allah’s will, by the Rabbis and the Doctors of Law: for to them was entrusted the protection of Allah’s Book, and they were witnesses thereto: therefore fear not men, but fear Me, and sell not My Signs for a miserable price. (Quran, 5:44) Truly Pharaoh elated himself in the land and broke up its people into sections depressing a group among them: their sons he slew, but he kept alive their females: for he was indeed a maker of mischief. (28:4) So We sent this inspiration to the mother of Moses: “Suckle (thy child) but when thou hast fears about him cast him, into the river, but fear not nor grieve: for We shall restore him to thee, and We shall make him one of Our messengers.” (28:7) The wife of Pharaoh said: “(Here is) a joy of the eye for me and for thee: slay him not. It may be that he will be of use to us, or we may adopt him as a son.” And they perceived not (what they were doing)! (28:9) Thus did We restore him to his mother that her eye might be comforted, that she might not grieve and that she might know that the promise of Allah is true: but most of them do not understand. (28:13) But when he came to the (Fire), a voice was heard from the right bank of the valley, from a tree in hallowed ground: “O Moses! Verily I am Allah the Lord of the Worlds…” (28:30) And when the two bodies saw each other, the people of Moses said: “We are sure to be overtaken.” (Moses) said: “By no means! My Lord is with me! Soon will He guide me!” Then We told Moses by inspiration: “Strike the sea with thy rod.” So it divided, and each separate part became like the huge, firm mass of a mountain. And We made the other party approach thither. We delivered Moses and all who were with him; but We drowned the others. Verily in this is a Sign: but most of them do not believe. And verily thy Lord is He, the Exalted in Might, Most Merciful. (26:61-68) And We made a people, considered weak (and of no account), inheritors of lands in both East and West - lands whereon We sent down Our blessings. The fair promise of thy Lord was fulfilled for the Children of Israel, because they had patience and constancy, and we leveled to the ground the great works and fine buildings which Pharoah and his people erected (with such pride). (7:137) And We ordained laws for him in the Tablets in all matters, both commanding and explaining all things (and said): “Take these and hold these with firmness, and enjoin thy people to hold fast by the best in the precepts.” (7:145) …Aaron said: “Son of my mother! The people did indeed reckon me as naught, and went near to slaying me! Make not the enemies rejoice over my misfortune, nor count thou me amongst the people of sin.” (7:150) And remember, Moses said to his people: “O my people! Why do ye vex and insult me, though ye know that I am the messenger of Allah (sent) to you?” (61:5) He said: “O my Lord! I have power only over myself and my brother: so separate us from this rebellious people!” (5:25)
Salam, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace. Idol Worship is prohibited in Hinduism not in a single place.... It is mentioned in Svetashvatara Upanishad chapter 4 verse 19 As well as in: “There is no image of Him” (Svetashvatara Upanishad 4:19) It is mentioned in Yajurved Chapter 32 Verse 3 “There is no image of Him” (Yajurved 32:3) It is also mentioned in Yajurveda Chapter 40 verse 9 “They enter darkness those who worship natural things (for e.g. air, water, fire, etc.). They sink deeper in darkness those who worship sambhuti i.e. created things (for e.g. table, chair, car, idol etc.) (Yajurved 40:9) Idol worship, which is very common amongst the Hindus, is prohibited in Hinduism. It is mentioned in Bhagavad Gita Chapter 7 verse 20: “Those whose intelligence has been stolen by material desires they worship demigods i.e. idols.(Bhagavad Gita 7:20) * Hindu Scriptures: "There is only ONE God, not the second; not at all, not at all, not in the least bit."[Brahma Sutra] * Hindu Scriptures: "He is ONE ONLY without a second." [Chandogya Upanishad 6:2:1] Hindu Scriptures: " O friends, do not worship ANYBODY but Him, the Divine One. Praise Him ALONE."[Rigveda 8:1:1] Hindu Scriptures: "I am the goal of life, the LORD and support of all, the inner witness, the abode of all. I am the only refuge, the ONE true friend; I am the beginning, the staying, and the end of creation; I am the womb and the eternal seed. I am heat; I give and withhold the rain. I am immortality and I am death; I am what is and what is not"[Bhagavad Gita 9:18-19]
Salam, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace. Hebrew Alphabet Is Derived From Aramaic, Turned Into Squarer Shapes, Akin To Japanese Kanji And Korean Hangul, From Chinese, A Mere 1,500 Years Ago, At The Period Of Prophet Muhammad. The Language Contains Arabic, Aramaic, Persian, Phoenician & Yiddish. The Rabbi's Claim It Is The Oldest Language, But Why Is Arabic In Most Language's Instead Of Hebrew ?
A big advantage of keeping the Hebrew Alphabet as it is, is that you can read texts that were composed even thousands of years ago, and understand the meaning, although you would have great diffeculty understanding the speach of the authors. Also, different traditions evolved among Jews as to how to read Hebrew. An Israeli can not understand an Ashkenazi rabbi from Brooklyn reading Hebrew, but both can look at the same page and understand perfectly.
A few years ago I would have agreed with you completely, I think. But actually I've come to see a kind of beauty in this type of redundancy and context-dependency. I learned a tiny bit of (biblical) Hebrew, and I felt that the writing is something you can quite quickly develop a feel for, as you also mentioned, and the redundant and ambiguous letters give each word a slightly different character, which makes them easier to remember and distinguish. Writing is a mnemonic tool, after all. Of course there are the occasional historical exceptions like שלמה but all in all, I think it's a really good system, hebrew texts are very compact, the letters look extremely cool..
Awesome vid, I personally really enjoy writing (not as much reading) in Hebrew. I sincerely admire the beauty of the letters (my favorite is mem sufit, just pure aesthetic perfection) but I definitely agree with the fact that I myself can be heard mumbling the correspondent of пиздец under my breath when I look up the pronunciation of a word after guessing it
The funny thing about conservative orthographies that no longer make sense, is that so often the main argument* for not fixing it and revising the spelling to something more phonetic is that it would make ancient texts (often written when it was still sensible) less readable to modern readers. Which I guess is. _an_ argument, but it's not a particularly good one because usually not only have the sounds changed since ancient times but grammar and meaning of words have changed, so the only thing you gain by not fixing the spelling is the ability to to read old texts out loud in a completely different pronunciation than it originally had while still not understanding most of it. It doesn't even take much time, texts written in Norwegian in the 1800s which probably haven't even changed particularly much in sounds or spelling (because in Norway we do update the spelling fairly regularly to stay reasonably phonetic) the texts still require quite a bit of knowledge to be able to understand because they talk about a society that were very different.
Oh. I forgot my conclusion: So the only "benefit" of not fixing the spelling is that it makes it marginally easier for scholars to decipher old texts, at the cost of having a harder time figuring out the pronunciation and having to learn more historical pronunciation rules etc. While if we throughout history had consistently spelled everything phonetically knowing the historical pronunciation would be easy and understanding old words would be marginally harder (though not much really, because we would be less likely to assume the modern meaning of a word if it's not looking identical anymore)
Preach brother!! As a Welshman who has an interest in Hebrew and been to Israel twice, I've just given up! I remember the uncalled for and embarrasing joy I felt when I managed to read 'kiosk' as that was one of the few words which I could learn without known context etc. Why didn't Ben Yehuda just decide to use bet for b only and then vav (or whatever for v). But put in the five vowels - and use those final letter for distinc sounds. Also, the letter, - except for the beautiful lamed (and kof) look too similar. I learnt Cyrillic - it's excellent. But Hebrew - so blinking frustrating. Not worth the bother. Welsh is written phonetically and we have mutations (where the first letter of a word can change depending on the context - it's a great frustration to Welsh speakers and learners .. but, at least someone can read every Welsh word clearly and mostly correctly within 5 minutes of studying!!). I share your pain and frustration - stupid, infuriating alphabet!
Salam, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace. Hebrew Alphabet Is Derived From Aramaic, Turned Into Squarer Shapes, Akin To Japanese Kanji And Korean Hangul, From Chinese, A Mere 1,500 Years Ago, At The Period Of Prophet Muhammad. The Language Contains Arabic, Aramaic, Persian, Phoenician & Yiddish. The Rabbi's Claim It Is The Oldest Language, But Why Is Arabic In Most Language's Instead Of Hebrew ?
Gotta say that's kinda weird. I'm a Hebrew native speaker + Hebrew teacher + I specialise in teaching kids with reading AND writing disabilities.. So I dare to assuma I know a thing or two how kids learn to read and write in Hebrew. So here goes: 1. Sure, to a person who doesn't SPEAK hebrew, learning how to read without nikkud is VERY difficult. 2. Writing would be even more difficult, sure 3. However, if you TRULY are a native speaker, who is ALSO litterate, meaning you read a fair amount of Hebrew on a daily basis.. it is very unusual for you to find writing THAT difficult, unless you have a writing disability 🤷🏻♀️ The fact is, most Israelis write in hebrew without major difficulties. The main misspellig would be switching ח with כ, and ע with א.. but even that usually only happens with very specific words..again, that is if you speak at a native level, and are also exposed to written Hebrew on a daily basis. Exposure and repetition is key, as most of the words in our brains are not stored phonetically, but rather globally/ortographically, meaning remembering the word as a whole, and not analysing each sound every time you read or write the word.. So I'd suggest you read more (:
I'm a native speaker, in the early days of Israel there were differences in pronouncing ט and ת , also for כ and ק.. Today Israelis can't pronounce it, they shifted to more Ashkenazi (Caucasian like) pronouncing, they dropped the sounds of it to stay will the same sound but words kept be written differently. Even as young Israelis it is difficult but it has it past
I learned biblical Hebrew and we used the modern pronounciation during class. I would have preferred the ancient (or reconstructed) pronounciation since it makes it easier to memorize some words and also helps understanding tonal rules. And there would not have been so many redundant letters.
"Y" sounding similar to the vowel "i" doesn't mean it's a vowel. "Y" makes sound /j/ (voiced palatal approximant), /ʝ/ (voiced palatal fricative) and /i/ (high front unrounded vowel), if you check the first two sounds they are consonantal (you close the vocal tract when pronouncing it) and /i/ regardless of its name it be either vowel or consonantal.
As a native hebrew speaker, the alphabet is very easy to use for most hebrew speakers, it is true that you just need to know some words to know how they are written but most words are directly readable from experience or plausible guess. For first graders who speak Hebrew it truly is pretty fun that you have to complete the words voiles (even though they're mostly written with nikud for first grade) because you can almost always guess them. I think the hebrew alphabet is pretty good even because most of the words in hebrew are much shorter because of the missing voiles- I think it's just an easy to write harder to read vs easy to read and harder to write problem- the hebrew alphabet has less letters and shorter words so it's easy to write in but harder to read in. I may be biased as Hebrew is my native language but I still think it's one of the easiest and more compact alphabets.
I agree! The video does make the point that modern Hebrew doesn’t really need the ancient alphabet, but I think it just adds a beautiful link to the past
Salam, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace. Hebrew Alphabet Is Derived From Aramaic, Turned Into Squarer Shapes, Akin To Japanese Kanji And Korean Hangul, From Chinese, A Mere 1,500 Years Ago, At The Period Of Prophet Muhammad. The Language Contains Arabic, Aramaic, Persian, Phoenician & Yiddish. The Rabbi's Claim It Is The Oldest Language, But Why Is Arabic In Most Language's Instead Of Hebrew ?
@@omarlittle-hales8237 Shlomo? Peace? Maybe Shalom. Hangul is designed from scratch. It's not like the Chinese language system. It's FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT.
@@zaco-km3su Salam, Shlomo [Aramaic], Shalom, Peace. Who developed the Hangul system? The Hangul system was developed by Sejong, fourth king of the Chosŏn dynasty, in 1443 to improve literacy. In 1446 Hangul was made the official writing system of Korea. Despite this, Hanja (Chinese characters) persisted as the main writing system of the elite class for 500 more years.
😊 my favourite confusing word is דוד. Is it daveed (David)? Dood (water heater)? or dod (uncle)? This video started out a bit funny but when he continued to run down the language it began to be a bit sad. Every language has it's idiosyncrasies and knowing the history behind it would help in understanding it because that was how it evolved. There's no point complaining about it. He mentioned Chinese but I wonder if he knows that it has a similar problem which is the exact opposite of Hebrew. The pronunciation can be confusing but when written down everything is perfectly clear.
I natively speak Aramaic. One of the major issues from my POV is that the niqqud system is too complicated because you're only supposed to use Waw/Vav and Yod/Yud for oo/oh and ee/eh sounds but Niqqud can replace them. I guess the bonus of that means that you don't need to rely on Waw/Vav and Yud but still, the extra flexibility makes it more complicated. Another issue is that alot of Hebrew speakers are using letters that have lost their original meaning. Tet is not supposed to sound the same as Taw/Tav. Tsadi is not supposed to be a "ts" either, Kuf/Quf is not supposed to sound like Kaf, and Khet is not supposed to sound like modified Kaf. Every letter is supposed to represent its own unique sound. (in fact, Nikkud is actually supposed to called "niqqud") Just like with Aramaic though, the Hebrew alphabet also has a system of "softening" and "hardening" sounds like Bet becoming Vet.
Salam, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace. Hebrew Alphabet Is Derived From Aramaic, Turned Into Squarer Shapes, Akin To Japanese Kanji And Korean Hangul, From Chinese, A Mere 1,500 Years Ago, At The Period Of Prophet Muhammad. The Language Contains Arabic, Aramaic, Persian, Phoenician & Yiddish. The Rabbi's Claim It Is The Oldest Language, But Why Is Arabic In Most Language's Instead Of Hebrew ?
There is Th sound in Ancient hebrew like in English but not in Arabic nobody use it but it better ti start sound Dalet without Dagesh like MoTHer faTHer real Tav without dagesh not from Ashkenuses THink or THanks Gimel without dagesh like Turkish hard G Reply
@@СемёнСемёнычСемён Salam, Shlama, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace. 1. Mossad Was Behind 9/11. 2. Mossad Was Behind The Fall Of Saddam Hussein. 3. Mossad Was Behind The Fall Of Colonel Gaddafi. 4. Mossad Was Behind The Afghan War. 5. Mossad Was Behind The Syrian War. 6. Mossad Was Behind The Fall Of Lebanon. 7. Mossad Was Behind The Sudan Civil War.
Salam, Shlama, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace. 1. Mossad Was Behind 9/11. 2. Mossad Was Behind The Fall Of Saddam Hussein. 3. Mossad Was Behind The Fall Of Colonel Gaddafi. 4. Mossad Was Behind The Afghan War. 5. Mossad Was Behind The Syrian War. 6. Mossad Was Behind The Fall Of Lebanon. 7. Mossad Was Behind The Sudan Civil War.
@@СемёнСемёнычСемён Salam, Shlama, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace. Th In Arabic = Tha There Was No Ancient Hebrew, Just Aramaic And Arabic, Hebrew Is A Mere 1,500 Years Old. Created To Separate Themselves From Aramaic And The Arabic Quran, At The Time Period Of Prophet Muhammad. The Rabbi's Confirmed That He Was Prophet, And Always Went To Him For Advice And Counsel, But Said He Was From The Unwed Egyptian Concubine. Whilst The Quran Confirms That Hagar Was A Egyptian Princess, Married To Abraham The Friend Of God. Even The Word Muhammadim In Psalms Is Muhammad, But The Rabbi's Claim It Is Solomon's Lover. Neither Abraham The Friend Of God Or King And Prophet Solomon, Can Have Unwed Relations As They Are Both Great Prophets Of God. Also Missing In Torah, Is The Fact Solomon Was Both King And Prophet, Akin To His Father David.
Oh, and in Askenazi Ecclesiastical Pronounciation, not only Samech and Sin have the sound [s], but so does Tav without a Dagesh, which was [θ] in an older form.
Whenever people tend to forget the traditional things, considers them obsolete and explore a 'modern' alternative to replace the original thing, then, the whole thing becomes complex and confusing. The same thing happens to language as well and I feel it is the case here too. Thank you very much indeed for showing us this amazing world of 'language and letters'...
There were actually several attempts at Hebrew romanization. The problem is that's when you discover the same letter two-sounds cases are actually required for the root system to function😀.
Thanks for this video. I'm not Israeli, nor am I Jewish, nor am I a Hebrew learner, but I always thought about how the sound merges, pronunciation changes, and overall lack of non-niqqud written vowel consistency really doesn't do Hebrew any favors.
Is the orthography of Ivrit identical to Biblical Hebrew? It kind of reminds me of modern Greek, which keeps some of the spelling of Ancient Greek, despite so many vowels being just /i/ now. Is the reason why some letters have the same sound value that they used to be emphatic, but given Ashkenazim were the majority of immigrants to Israel, a more "Europeanised" pronunciation prevailed as those emphatic sounds aren't found in any European language?
I think so. There are some changes, such as some words adding matres lectionis to the words to give a hint as to what vowel is in the word, but overall Modern and Biblical Hebrew are similar in orthography. I'd say that Modern Standard Israeli Hebrew is a mix between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Hebrew, with Sephardi Hebrew influencing the vowels more and Ashkenazi Hebrew influencing the consonants more, aside from final Tav, although Eliezer Ben-Yehudah wanted it to be based on entirely Sephardi pronunciation, reality had other plans, and yes many of the new Hebrew speakers had European Ashkenazi accents
In fact, since the establishment of the State of Israel for a long period of time (I do not have accurate information about the origin of the Jewish population today) it had a majority of Jews of Spanish and Mizrahi ("Eastern") origin. The pronunciation of Jews whose mother tongue was Ladino is very different from that of those whose mother tongue was Arabic. Jews of Ashkenazi origin who lived in Israel for generations also spoke with an "oriental" accent. I remember older Ashkenazi Jews from Tsfat, for example, who spoke Yiddish with an Arabic ("eastern") accent...
Ladino/Judeo-Spanish takes that wonderful alphabet-jad and applies it to Spanish.....or Old Castellan, and also has a huge Turkish vocabulary. So imagine that nonsense. "El", a very common word indeed, is spelled aleph-yod-lamed, because yod can be e. Silent aleph everywhere.
@@RCSVirginia Yes, when Turkey switched to the Latin alphabet in the 1920's or whenever it was, the Ladino community in Turkey also switched to Latin. As it was the largest community and had a bigger output of published material, that became the de-facto standard. But the Rashi script was still used for ~500 years, and there is more extant material in that script than in Latin!
@@ajrollo1437 As Ladino is derived from medieval Spanish--in fact, one can get the gist of it by simply knowing a little Spanish--it makes sense to use a Latin script for it. Semitic languages are not ones that I speak, but I have read that they are better suited for abjads due to the structure of their words than Aryan languages are. That may or may not be true. Turks have told me that the Arabic abjad was not well suited for Turkish and that the change in the writing system was a major improvement. On the other hand, some have told me that the old Court Osmanli was a beautiful tongue and that its calligraphy was gorgeous. So, I guess that there is always a loss and a gain. It does seem to me that it would be a good idea for Ladino organizations to translate documents in the old Rashi writing into Latin letters to give modern people better access to them.
As a teacher of Hebrew myself, I was smiling the entire time. One day, I must play your video to my students so that they know, they are not alone in their frustrations🙂 Btw.: Some people like to joke that Hebrew is more a Slavic language than a Semitic one😀 To anybody wondering, why things are the way they are in Hebrew, I highly recommend getting at least some basic course in Arabic. Many things start to make sense after that, because Arabic still maintains many of the rules that were dropped in pronounciation of Hebrew.
Fun video, especially for somebody who knows English or Russian (that are both very hard to spell correctly) I've started learning Hebrew at around age of 16... One of the biggest things that helped me understand the writing is a small book about grammar that talked about משקל concept and how actually the words are built. And at this point it all start make sense. Because you start understanding that you don't really care about ניקוד - it is all well implied by משקל... And the language very-very well structured around Semic roots so once I figured this out it all become way more clear. Actually I find that once you think roots - it all become so much clear and simpler in both writing and reading. BTW I like that there is cursive in Hebrew. It exists in Russian (and cursive in Russian is אויי ואיי to read) and used to be in English till it was phased out. Yet your examples are funny. BTW your forgot one more "et": עֵט, עֵת, אֶת
@@Сусек quite easily - I use Linux with lyx layout. And it is easy to remember for example קמץ on ק and חולם at ו - so when I press shift - instead of capital letter it types ניקוד. on windows 10 there should be a new layout for new standard quite similar to lyx - but not sure how to enable one (not using windows for a long time) שָלוֹם
I agree partially with your conclusion, but I think that there are some answers to why it is this way. 1) as a language that would originally have been carved (which is why it's written from right to left) it makes sense that it is an abjad. 2) because Hebrew is based on roots, Shlomo probably has at its base the idea that He is peace/whole, which might be lost with the extra vav's. 3) with the dispersion of the Jewish people, certain pronunciations were lost as the language that they predominantly spoke didn't have that sound. One example is the thaf, which was pronounced as an 's' in the Ashkenazi areas and a 't' in the Sephardi areas. This is why we have Shabbat and Shabbas. People have to some extent kept these mispronunciations because it's easier than to try and learn "Yemenite" pronunciation, in which all of the letters actually sound different, which would also correct the problem of misspelling. 4) the fact that Hebrew came back as a spoken language at a time when we write, so extra letters are not difficult to produce, but they will aid in pronunciation and understanding, this vav, yud and aleph are all used as vowel markers. 5) the fact that many people needed to learn Hebrew quickly, often under difficult circumstances, so there wasn't the will to make things internally consistent.
07:55 - A few corrections: The letters ט & ת are not actually the same. Listen to the way the yemenites pronounce them. And same goes for ק, which is *not* like כ - and, in fact, ק should be transcripted as a Q. I completely agree with You, that the Beautiful _Niqqudh_ should be *an integral part* of the written Hebrew Language, *ALWAYS.* And most especially so when it comes to the dots _within_ a letter = the _Daghesh_ and the _Mapiq_ = the dot inside a ה, which deserve *a **_special_** respect:* it *is,* after all, *the LAST and ONLY surviving remnant, of a Case System in Hebrew.* 🙂
At the ancient age I am- and trying to learn this language just to keep my noggin going- I thought all these years of struggle "It's just me"- you have articulated otherwise. Thanks!
You'll get used to that. The good thing is that all of the problems discussed in this video do not apply to Biblical Hebrew. The pronunciation differences are still in tact, and niqqud are regularly written. Everything about the alphabet made sense in ancient times, it got fucked up during its revitalization.
Great video, I found it very interesting. I'm always fascinated by languages, and the complaints that people seem to be constantly making about their own. I was born in the US, and learned Persian from my parents, which uses the Arabic script. I definitely agree that having a different shape depending on where in the word you are is an interesting quirk (once you actually remember all of them), and I'm very grateful that Persian doesn't have nearly as many spelling inconsistencies as you've pointed out in Hebrew. But definitely, one hundred percent, the thing that makes me the angriest is the vowel diacritics. I can speak fairly well about the things that don't require very technical words, but when it comes to reading, I have to slow down on each individual word and run through every possible vowel combination until I find one that I recognize. And for writing, I'm probably less proficient than a primary schooler: we don't have many spelling inconsistencies, but the few rules about inconsistency that exist are fairly common.
Persian has similar problems as Hebrew. For example, two types of T in Arabic are pronounced the same in Persian. I know all these "duplicated" letters only exist in loan words from Arabic, but Persian has a lot of them (as many as 40%). Persian would probably be better written with a Latin or Cyrillic alphabet (like in Tajikistan)
@@tFighterPilot two Ts, three Ss, four Zs, plus the whole U/V and I/Y dilemma, yeah. No comment as to whether or not it would be better off with latin or cyrillic, but personally I like keeping the arabic script, purely for the sake of calligraphy and artistic purposes.
Amazing vid. Feels so good to hear all these frustrations vented out. I've been learning a bit of hebrew and yeah I'm already getting used to the bs. So many inconsistencies in english and portuguese too, my native language
I don't want to tell people how to write in their native language as someone who is neither Jewish nor a Hebrew speaker, but I think having Nikkud on all words would be a good idea. Especially since I find the Nikkud to not only make it easier to read but also adds beauty to the script. It's just so nice.
Once you learn them it’s fascinating how quickly you can do without them. That said, I will note that without question, Israelis and the government regularly use diacritics/nikkud when writing out new or uncommon words. Also, you get pretty good a guessing what is likely to follow since Hebrew is a largely standardized language with emphasis on 2nd or 3rd syllables and consistency with plurals and reflexive sounds. You can learn how to say one word and then apply that to many others and usually be right
Nah man, since you're an English speaker I don't think you get it. I speak Urdu for which the writing system is like Arabic, no vowels written. Since I'm fluent in it, I just read it with problems, but a non native cannot read it. I also speak Japanese, when I was younger I always thought the characters are stupid and the "furigana" or how to read the characters should be present next to all the kanji, until I actually learnt them and now don't care about furigana. Heck, Japanese doesn't even use spaces. It's like telling an English speaker to stop using the weird and historical spellings and just write the words the way they are pronounced. Suddenly doesn't work does it?
@@amj.composer I see what you saying, and I don't disagree with a majority of your post. the problem is your last line. It's not like adding Nikkud would be up and redoing the full spelling system, only keeping the training wheels. Getting rid of the weird and historical spelling of English would not only require a full spelling reform, it would also require everyone to relearn how to read and write (there are a ton of great videos that explain this better than I). That is comparing apples to dynamite. Both are objects, but one would be an inconvenience and a preference, whereas the other could blow up in your face. I would love it If English used the Diacritics that were used to teach me how to read because I have an extremely hard time with reading and writing because of dyslexia. This is my fault for not adding context to my post and just writing out my original comment when I wasn't fully awake. It would be really nice if more books offered reading aids to those who would like to read the text but also offered help for those who have issues with reading. Again not your fault I screwed up with my original comment or anyone's fault I'm slow as hell to think.
@@Avatarfan10000 Oh no, not your fault at all, and I actually definitely agree with you since you have provided context. On a slightly similar but maybe perhaps unrelated note with Urdu, I WISH more at least beginner to intermediate books had the pronunciation marks. Would've helped my Urdu journey immensely. (Context: Native Hindi Speaker who learnt Urdu by self-study and reading Novels/Poetry)
The reasons for this cofusion stems from Hebrew letters being Assyrian, and Jews losing the pronounciation of their own language from living in Europe for 2000 years. In Assyrian we use the exact same letters the same way, and even spell in a similar manner, but each letter has its own sound, and spelling makes a lot more sense. The main reason for Jews not to update spelling for modern Hebrew would be that it confuses root words, since Semitic languages use a lot of conjugations of one root word
I'm a Hebrew speaker here, I laughed out loud, I definitely agree, by the way you forgot to mention the stolen "petah" phenomenon, words like an apple that you only write "tapuh" but actually say "tapuah" as if where is the "a" By the way, I think that's why I often encounter people who write with errors, even if they are native speakers And a little something added the letter "כ" is actually خ And the letter "ח" is actually ح same for "ת ט" that they are ت ط Indeed most people do not pronounce
As an Israeli, native hebrew speaker, I am biased, Iget it. Everything you mentioned in your video is correct, but still I love the hebrew language, it's logic, it's layers of history. And I wouldn't change it. There has been some suggestions (not too serious ones) to change the Hebrew alphabet to Latin script. I am against it: the whole logic of the language ( mainly the roots system which is quite genial) would get lost this way. בקיצור, לא מצחיק ותניח לעברית שלנו בשקט Let our Hebrew be!
This was my exact experience trying to learn Arabic. Sometimes, expecially in the first year of learning, I just wanted to quit trying to learn how to read and just use the Ge'ez script because abugidas are a work of art and deserve to be praised. Unfortunately, the Ge'ez script doesn't have the ð or θ sounds, so it wouldn't be a good writing system replacement for Arabic. I eventually got used to the Arabic writing system, but the lack of diacritics still throws me off. I'm also still not the best at distinguishing diacritics from long vowels, so I absolutely suck at spelling. It's a work in progress, but hopefully I'll get there soon.
I'm a native Hebrew and Yiddish speaker learning Arabic . I recently started reading Judeo-Arabic as it is the only way for me to read classic Arabic at a reasonable pace I .
Salam, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace. Hebrew Alphabet Is Derived From Aramaic, Turned Into Squarer Shapes, Akin To Japanese Kanji And Korean Hangul, From Chinese, A Mere 1,500 Years Ago, At The Period Of Prophet Muhammad. The Language Contains Arabic, Aramaic, Persian, Phoenician & Yiddish. The Rabbi's Claim It Is The Oldest Language, But Why Is Arabic In Most Language's Instead Of Hebrew ?
I'm Brazilian. And in Portuguese, we have a lot of bad decisions when it comes to representing the sound of a word. For example, the "s" sound (like in the s of "sound" or "seek") may be represented by "ss", "ç", "c" or "s." It's awful. Even I, a native speaker, have a hard time knowing how to write some words because of it. I even had to buy a Portuguese Course to learn stuff like this. I'M A NATIVE SPEAKER. I am supposed to master my own language. But Portuguese is easier than Hebrew, I guess.
as a native speaker of both hebrew and brazilian portuguese, i can assure you that portuguese orthography is much easier. besides /s/ (s/c/sc/x/xc/ç) and /ʃ/ (x/ch) i think it's pretty straight forward
The 2nd script of the Modern Hebrew alphabet isn't called Cursive Hebrew, it's called (at least in Hebrew) Handwritten script (ktiv) - the name isn't 1-to-1 translatable to English. That is the script people write with almost exclusively. The other, boxy script, called Print, is used in print and is taught to kids. It's analagous to how spoken language is different than formal language. The Nikkud (diacritics) remain the same, however. Cursive writing *does* exist, and only for Handwriting script - you could connect up Print script letters but that's stylistic, so it'd just be a font.
Hello, native Hebrew speaker here. This video is hilarious, but it's not a real problem pretty much ever (for natives) you want something real to rant about? Try explaining the Hebrew Nikud (ניקוד) that all Israeli kids have to learn in high school. There are a billion different Nikud symbols (and many represent the same vowel), each symbol is not interchangable, there are a billion rules that you have to learn before you can spell with the Nikud correctly, to learn Nikud you have to go through the entire hebrew grammer such as verbs, binyanim (בניינים), gzarot (גזרות), and so much more! Every student in Israel has to study of this and has to know perfectly how to use Nikud correctly and the worst part is that it's completely useless because no one over the age of 10 even uses the tiny symbols!!! Also we all forget these rules 10 minutes after we finish the Hebrew finals
Congrats..you got a subscriber..I came across your Uralic video (naganan or however it's written). But I checked out what else you have to offer...and man, as an oleh who had to learn Hebrew, you have it nailed...Perfect.
1:00 Hangul isn't that great anymore, actually. Korean phonology has changed somewhat since its invention 550 years ago, so the letters don't quite correspond to pronunciation anymore. For example, there's six consonant letters that are all pronounced /t/ at the end of a syllable, and the pronunciation ofㅔandㅐhas also merged. I think that Cyrillic as used to write more or less any language other than Russian corresponds the best to spoken language.
Salam, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace. Hebrew Alphabet Is Derived From Aramaic, Turned Into Squarer Shapes, Akin To Japanese Kanji And Korean Hangul, From Chinese, A Mere 1,500 Years Ago, At The Period Of Prophet Muhammad. The Language Contains Arabic, Aramaic, Persian, Phoenician & Yiddish. The Rabbi's Claim It Is The Oldest Language, But Why Is Arabic In Most Language's Instead Of Hebrew ?
3:20 Dude, ALL Abjads are "impure Abjads". The term "Abjad" was taken from "impure Abjad" scripts. Proto-Sinaic and later Paleo-Hebrew/Phoenician (basically the same) Abjads ARE the first Abjads and they have vowel letters. Hebrew is the closest living language to the hypothetical script of "pure Abjad". If anything is flawed in here is the meaning of the term "Abjad".
Great video; really funny. I'm guessing that Hebrew, like Arabic, once had hard and soft varieties of s, t and d, but that because Hebrew was revived by speakers of languages like Russian, Polish, German and Yiddish, which lack those distinctions, the pronunciations coalesced?
As someone who learned Hebrew as a kid and remembers endless worksheets of having to pick either aleph/ayin, kof/khof, bet/vet/vav to spell a word correctly, part of the reason that there are several letters for the "same sound" is that there are closely-related sounds that Hebrew lost over time. For example, Arabic has 3 letters for 3 kinds of /t/ sounds: /t/, /t'/ the back of the throat one) and /th/ (which isn't exactly a /t/ but close enough). Hebrew had those sounds too, which is why there's tet, tof and tof dagesh. (The /'t'/ sound seems to have turned into tsadi in Hebrew, so maybe there might overwise have been 4 letters for more or less the same sound!) But Hebrew lost those alternate sounds, while Arabic kept them, so the Arabic writing system seems more logical just because those sounds are still the same. English most definitely has this problem with vowel combinations, as does French, but Thai is the famous one for having multiple letters for sounds that the modern language has lost (many were borrowed from Pali and Sanskrit originally-- there are excellent videos floating around about it), making learning to read and write a nightmare for most everyone.
One of the names that annoyed me as a kid was "גיא" (pronounced Guy)... Where's the א??? Where did it go? How are we supposed to put two vowels on the G sound??? The language literally doesn't support that... Is the i sound attached to the י? But than י wouls become a constanant and there would be a stop in the middle of the name and it sound something more like Guyi, which it doesn't, it's literally just Guy... Man I haven't thought about it for 13 years
As a native Arabic speaker, this entire mess could've been avoided if the pronunciation of the revived language was kept the same as other semetic languages instead of being influenced by European pronunciation. Half the letters that have multiple pronunciations originally had one sound that ceased to exist, ק≠כ, ט≠ת, ח≠כ, ש≠ס≠צ and so on. When I'm learning Hebrew i just pronounce them the "semetic" way just to make my learning easier, then I add a foreign European accent to sound the "correct" way.
Exactly. What is off-putting about modern Hebrew is that it has a European softness to it, instead of the strong pronunciation of the ancient Hebrew language. Hebrew as spoken by the Israelites would've sounded similar to Aramaic and Arabic today, but since it was revived primarily by Ashkenazi Jews, who spoke European mother tongues before re-creating Israel, it comes across as soft and even a bit lispy. They indeed should've kept the original Semitic sound in the reconstruction of modern Hebrew. This whole debacle with the writing system is also unsurprising because of this.
This is literally the best explanation of the Hebrew letters I've ever seen. Thank you, and bless you for doing this. Also, thank you for making it funny!
אוקיי, אני מרגיש שאני התגובה היחידה בעברית כאן, בקיצר, אתה הסברת כאן את הנושא בצורה מצחיקה יחסית אבל האלפבית הזה הוא לא כלכך סיוט בשביל דוברי עברית כשפת אם (לפחות מהנסיון שלי עם סביבתי)
צודק במאה אחוז - כשאתה לומד את זה מגיל אפס אז בטח שזה לא בעיה. אני פשוט אוהב להתלונן על דברים שאני לא רואה בהם הגיון, ובהשוואה להמון שפות אחרות שלמדתי, אצל עברית ההגיון הוא די.. רופף.
כמי שעברית היא שפת האם שלה אני מרגישה לגמרי בנוח עם שיטת הכתיבה שלה. כשאני למדתי קרוא וכתוב (מזמן...) עדיין הרבה אנשים דיברו במבטא "נכון". האחדת הכיתוב בהתאמה למבטא של ה"עברית המודרנית" (כפי שמבטאים רוב ילידי ישראל) יגרום לאיבוד המשמעות המקורית של המילים. להתלונן על כך שיש אותיות "דפוס" ואותיות "כתב" עוד יותר מוזר. הרי זה קיים גם בשפות אחרות. האותיות הסופיות הן הצורה המקורית של האות. כאשר כותבים בעט (בניגוד לחציבה בסלע למשל) צורתן משתנה בתחילת/אמצע המילה באופן "טבעי" עם תנועת היד הכותבת. יש עוד שפות שנכתבות בשיטה דומה לעברית. למשל שפות ברבריות. גם הם מרוצים מהכתב שלהם וחושבים שהוא מתאים לשפה המדוברת. גם לפני 2000 שנה ויותר היו בארץ ישראל מבטאים שונים שחלקם נחשבו לא נכונים. מי שדיבר במבטא כזה לא הורשה לקרוא בתורה בציבור (אלא אם כן הוכיח שיודע לבטא "נכון" את המילים). שיטת הניקוד שנבחרה (מבין כמה שיטות שהתקיימו במקביל) היא הטבריינית שמתאימה להגייה הטבריינית שנחשבה לנכונה. הניקוד הומצא כאשר שפת הדיבור השתנתה ופחות אנשים דיברו עברית בחיי היומיום על מנת לשמר את ההגייה הנכונה של המילים ועל ידי כך את המשמעות המקורית. להתלונן באנגלית שהיא שפה המורכבת מערבוביה של שפות הנכתבות בהתאם לכללים השונים של כל שפה ושהאיות שלהן נקבע עוד לפני שהתגבשה השפה האנגלית המודרנית, על שפה שהכתב שלה התקבע הרבה יותר מוקדם והתאים לשפה הסדורה כפי שנהגתה נראה לי תמוה. גם הדקדוק האנגלי לא בדיוק "סדור". למי שמתקשה בכתיבה בעברית אני ממליצה לקרוא כמה שיותר. בסופו של דבר כולם לומדים לכתוב נכון
shakshuka!😆 There's another reason that I hate the lack of vowels. Sometimes the tense/binyan of verbs is distinguished only by the unwritten vowel sounds, making it impossible to tell which construction is meant, so while you can tell which verb is meant, you can't tell how/when the action took place.
Bless the ancient Greeks for inventing vowel signs.
Until they decided everything must be pronounced as [i]. 😢
Greek uses symilar to Arameic letter names and is possibly related. Macedonian, on the other hand, is an old slavic language using phonems and all german researchers always call it "ancient greek". There was no introduction but inentional invention. Slovians => Slowo [polish] = Word [English]. Okrag [polish] = circle, Oko [polish] = Eye, usmiech [polish] = smile with a shape of U. Polish Alphabet = Abecadlo = ABeCaDlo
@@leonazar hahahahahaha this comment made my day. I'm learning greek, I feel you. They need to update their spelling ASAP... looks very cool as it is right now though
@@cocoliguligu4842 The hell are you trying to say?
Or ancient Indians and Ethiopians for their abugidas. But Korean hangul is better than any of them.
As a native Arab, I see that many of these problems arise from the fact that some letters lost the original pronunciations in Hebrew. That's why when I learn a word like tekes, I can't possibly misspel it, because in Arabic, we have the same word with the same spelling and meaning but the t is not the usual t, nor is the k. This is a great aid in memorising Hebrew words. Just the knowledge of Arabic gives a huge unfair advantage.
Finally someone gets it. I am a Hebrew learner of a few years, and dabbled in a little Arabic for fun, and it actually added a lot of context, because I feel like Ancient Hebrew was much closer to Arabic than today, adding a explanations to the different letters
@@apstamp4560 Yes, there's that, but also, Arabic was extensively referenced in the process of reviving Hebrew. So not all the similarities go back to ancient times. Arabic had developed non-stop, so there was no point in reinventing the wheel, and adapting a semitic language to absorb all the scientific and modern terminologies of western languages presented many challenges.
@@apstamp4560 The way Hebrew was revived and is taught today is, methinks, heavily influenced by European tongues. That's not due to ignorance of Hebrew's original pronunciation, but to make it easier to grasp for the hundreds of thousands of European learners that had to learn it from the ground up and with no native speakers to interact with.
For example, that notion that ע is a vowel, or that ט is another ת are gross simplifications. But that's easier to teach than sounds that have no equivalent in any European tongue.
@@apstamp4560 Let's also remember that the modern Hebrew alphabet is not Hebrew. It's Aramaic. It wasn't created for this language, and that adds another level of unnecessary complexity.
> In Russian we call this “пиздец”.
I laughed out loud and hard at this. Thanks!
Any possibility of explaining the joke to us who don't speak Russian (yet)?
@@gaviswayze9696, there isn't a joke, really. It's just a Russian word meaning “a whole-ass disaster” or “a clusterfuck”, and hearing it in the middle of an English-language rant about the Hebrew alphabet was unexpected but delightful and fitting, heh.
Thanks! Now I can say six words in Russian: hello, goodbye, yes, no, thank you, and clusterfuck! I am delighted!@@DoctorFatman
I honestly thought of Life of Boris when he said that 😂
пизде́ц
-(vulgar) extreme degree of anything; fuckload, shitload, fuckton, shitton
1 000 000 - э́то пизде́ц ско́лько де́нег! ― 1 000 000 - éto pizdéc skólʹko déneg! ― One million is a shitload of money!
(-vulgar, sometimes humorous) extremely undesirable situation
And then there's the Yiddish spelling which does the same letters just better. Great content btw!
Except when you got those long strings of vav in some words, which just looks weird.
Unless you're writing a word taken from Hebrew, then it written the same and you pronounce it like an OG Ashkenazi.
ווו?@@ajrollo1437
@@ajrollo1437not weird, it's just like in English converting 2 V's into a W, except not always the same sound. Anyway anyone learning Hebrew in religious school (especially in Ashkenazi Europe or America) learns of the consecutive letters "Beis and Veis' or Tof and Sof. Just need a decent (read non Israeli) instruction and learning system
@@nngnnadas at one point there was a Soviet orthography as well that rivaled YIVO orthography in terms of publication output and that de-hebraicized Hebrew loanwords so for instance Sholem Aleichem‘s name was שאָלעם־אלייכעם
As someone who speaks Arabic fluently in a native level
Hebrew does make sense
The worst thing that the pure semitic sounds of some letters was lost in the European jewish communities
It was actually kept second best only to Yemen in Ashkenazi Jewish communities but in Israel we all pretty much dont keep it except for some Yemeni Jews
yeah like حاء it turned into خاء (kh) sound that's why Hebrew has a lot of kh sound
@@m070sam exactly ans also other differences for example we dont have the (th) sound and we dont pronounxe the letter ע (arabic r'ain?) correctly
@@Yahli20 well most sephardic and mizrahi Jews keep the original pronunciation of those letters
Specially the sounding of ɛayin "Ɛ"ع is a beautiful semitic letter alongside Ḥ/ح
@@tayebizem3749 sephardic and mizrahi Jews not really but older yemeni Jews do and younger generations dont
I speak Spanish, my mother language. I speak English. I learned it in Boston after living there for 15 years. I learned Haitian Creole in 2003. I can speak, read and write French. In 2014 I started to learned Japanese. I can speak it, and I can read it and write it in Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.
I just started to learn how to read Hebrew, and I find your video very funny.
Keep it up.
As a learner of Arabic who decided to look at Hebrew for fun to see the similarities, the writing system is what scared me off. I could successfully read Arabic with educated guesses after only about a month, but Hebrew I can’t even keep track of what sounds a character makes and the redundancy makes it worse 😭
I completely understand. Alot of it comes down to context, which is hard to have if you don't know much vocab, or know alot about the spoken language. Another thing is being aware of the doubles (the letters that make two separate sounds, so bet and vet for example). Even though there are only 22 letters, we have the sofits, which are letters with different forms when they're at the end of a word (mem vs. mem sofit). Then we have the issue of loan words, which are spelled in their own.. special way, if you will. Loan words are only spelled in hebrew with the letters that 100% are to make a certain needed sound. I know people say this alot, but you must practice. It took me 5 weeks of using flashcards everyday to get to the point where I could even read words (with nikkud).
Standard Arabic has only the vowels a, i, and u. Of course this reduces the guessing greatly. If you want to learn spoken Syrian or Moroccan, you'll guess more.
@@stephanpopp6210getting into arabic right now, i heard people saying you cant guess and have to know every word, but at the same time there are people who say you can guess. Can you enlighten me on that? At the moment i cant read much and just guess the vowel is “a”
@@Belti200 You can guess in many cases, but not in all. E.g. adjectives normally have the vowel pattern a - i (ee). So if you read something spelt KBIR, you know that it is pronounced "kabeer" (big). The more complicated verbs also have vowel patterns that hold for all, e.g. "yanfatihu" = it opens can only have these vowels, because it is a "no. 7" stem (with an n).
On the other hand, short words without a long vowel often need to be guessed. "Cat" is "hirr", not "harr", "dog" is "kalb", not "kulb", "it falls" is "yasqut", not "yasqat". You need to learn that.
Other than in Hebrew, there is no e or o.
@@Belti200
Well yes, native speakers guess all the time when they read. Given that you've acquired considerable amount of vocabulary, context will be your best friend. Similar to how you can spot the difference between record and record in a given sentence.
But even without context you can still guess most of the time. And the answer is to get into morphology aka sarf. I can explain more if you'd like
Knowing the history of words in the Semitic family really makes the nonsense comprehensible. It is as one linguist put it once "If you want to understand a semitic language, understand Arabic first, you'll save yourself a lot of trouble"
semitic" is It's just mumbled Arabic, really. Imagine English with a third of its letters removed, and simplified grammar. Thats Aramaic, hebrew, etc. For example, combine T,D into just T no need to have 2 letters. Same for i, e, y they all should be just y from now on, etc etc.
Arabic is the only corollary to proto-semitic, infact the whole semitic classification is nonsensical for anyone with a somewhat functioning mass between their ears. hebrew, aramaic, rest of madeup dialect continua only have 22 letters of the 29 protosemitic lettersz Arabic has all 29. The difference betweeen Arabic and the other creoles and Pidgin is the same as that between Latin and pig latin or italian.
"phoenician" is an Arabic dialect continuum, not only that, it is pidgin. It's simplified to the point of stupidity, anyone with a basic knowledge of Arabic would see this evidently clear.
What happened was, Arabic handicapped "scholars" saw the equivalent of scottish twitter spelling, with added mumbling by way of phonemic mergers (22 letters not 29) and thought themselves seeing a different language.
@@ranro7371
The best answer I have is we don't really know since it happened so long ago.
But Arabic is the best, most eloquent and coherent language spoken by the sons of Shem.
what nonsense you are talking. the phoenicians existed long before the arabs had any culture or literature at all. yoiu have no idea about what you are talking and probably a typical islamic understanding of history. @@ranro7371
1/
There are opinions, and there are factual statements. I appreciate your opinions.
Here is a factual statement. The Arabic language is the oldest continually spoken language in the world, back. In the 6th Century, only three languages had scripts and linguistics rich enough to have poetry. Those were Ancient Greek, Chinese, And Arabic. Of them, only Arabic exists as it did back then. Chinese script has no bearing on the language, which is why it is used by several languages, Ancient Greek has been standardized, only Arabic remains as the oldest continually spoken language whose speakers can read what was said 1500 years ago with the same fluency as anything written today. Languages degenerate as time passes by, old english lost its case endings, its genders, etc, back at a time when old english and the rest of the european vernaculars had no written script, entire encyclopedias were written in Arabic, but this isn't even the strangest part, what's truly strange is how is it so Perfect.
There is no other language quite like Arabic, to begin with, it appears in history with the Qur'an, from the Qur'an and by analysing the Qur'an, the grammatical rules which govern the Arabic languag ewere extracted, this is in itself a linguistic miracle seeing as how there had to have been a mathematical exactness to have a concordance of the type of which that would allow rules to be established, no other colloraly exist in any other language, not only that the fact of the matter is, the script itsef appears for the first time with it, and the script in itself is a miracle as it simply should not exist. I shall elaborate.
Arabic is the only corollary to proto-semitic, infact the whole semitic classification is nonsensical for anyone with a somewhat functioning mass between their ears. hebrew, aramaic, rest of madeup dialect continua only have 22 letters of the 29 protosemitic lettersz Arabic has all 29. The difference betweeen Arabic and the other creoles and Pidgin is the same as that between Latin and pig latin or italian.
Language; When you look at the actual linguistics, you'll find that many were puzzled by the opposite, that is, how the other "semetic" (why in quotes will be revealed later) languages were more "evolved" than Arabic, while Arabic had archaic features, not only archaic compared to bibilical Hebrew, Ethiopic, "Aramaic" contemporary "semetic" languages, but even archaic compared to languages from ancient antiquity; Ugaritic, Akkadain. What is meant here by Archaic is not what most readers think, it is Archaic not in the sense that it is simple, but rather that it is complex (think Latin to pig Latin or Italian or Old English, which had genders and case endings to modern English), not only grammatically, but also phonetically; All the so called semitic languages are supposed to have evolved from protosemetic, the Alphabet for protosemitic is that of the so called Ancient South Arabian (which interestingly corresponds with the traditional Arabic origins account) and has 28 Phonemes. Arabic has 28 phonemes. Hebrew has 22, same as Aramaic, and other "semitic" languages. Now pause for a second and think about it, how come Arabic, a language that is supposed to have come so late has the same number of letters as a language that supposedly predates it by over a millennium (Musnad script ~1300 BCE). Not only is the glossary of phonemes more diverse than any other semitic language, but the grammar is more complex, containing more cases and retains what's linguists noted for its antiquity, broken plurals. Indeed, a linguist has once noted that if one were to take everything we know about languages and how they develop, Arabic is older than Akkadian (~2500 BCE).
The real miracle of the Quran, the Arabic language. The thing the half educated don't know about is that Quranic Arabic is linguistically older than Akkadian. Both derive from "proto-semitic:, protosemitic has 29 letters, the same as Arabic meanwhile Akkadian underwent phonemic mergers
To show the relation of Arabic to other "semitic" languages, see below
Classical Arabic has largest phonemic inventories among semitic languages. It has 28 consonants (29 with Hamza) and 6 vowels (3 short and 3 long). Some of these sounds are rare or absent in other semitic languages. For example,
- Classical Arabic has two pharyngeal consonants /ʕ/ (ع) and /ħ/ (ح), which are produced by constricting the pharynx (the back part of the throat). These sounds are found only in some semitic languages (such as Hebrew and Amharic), but not in others (such as Akkadian and Aramaic).
- Classical Arabic has two emphatic consonants /sˤ/ (ص) and /dˤ/ (ض), which are produced by lowering the larynx (the voice box) and raising the back of the tongue. These sounds are found only in some semitic languages (such as Hebrew and Amharic), but not in others (such as Akkadian and Aramaic).
- Classical Arabic has two uvular consonants /q/ (ق) and /χ/ (خ), which are produced by retracting the tongue to the uvula (the small fleshy projection at the back of the soft palate). These sounds are found only in some semitic languages (such as Hebrew and Amharic), but not in others (such as Akkadian and Aramaic).
- Classical Arabic has two glottal consonants /ʔ/ (ء) and /h/ (ه), which are produced by opening and closing the glottis (the space between the vocal cords). These sounds are found in most semitic languages, but not in all of them. For example, Akkadian has lost the glottal stop /ʔ/, while Aramaic has lost both the glottal stop and the glottal fricative /h/.
- Classical Arabic has six vowel phonemes /a/, /i/, /u/, /aː/, /iː/, /uː/, which can be short or long. These vowels are found in most semitic languages, but not in all of them. For example, Akkadian has only three vowel phonemes /a/, /i/, /u/, which can be short or long, while Aramaic has only two vowel phonemes /a/ and /i/, which can be short or long.
To show the relation of Arabic to other "semitic" languages, see below
This is the protosemitic script, which contains the entirety of the phonemic inventory of semitic languages, its only 1:1 equivalent is Arabic, the rest dropped or mumbled the phonemes
𐩠 𐩡 𐩢 𐩣 𐩤 𐩥 𐩦 𐩧 𐩨 𐩩 𐩪 𐩫 𐩬 𐩭 𐩮 𐩰 𐩱 𐩲 𐩳 𐩴 𐩵 𐩶 𐩷 𐩸 𐩹 𐩺 𐩻 𐩼
Arabic
ا ب ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ك ل م ن ه و ي
A b t ṯ j h kh d ḏ r z s sh ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ ʿ ġ f q k l m n h w y
Hhbrew
א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ל מ נ ס ע פ צ ק ר ש ת
Merged phonemes in hebrew and aramaic:
ح, خ (h, kh) merged into only kh consonant remain
س, ش (s, sh) merged into only Shin consonant remaining
ط, ظ (ṭ/teth, ẓ) merged into only ṭ/teth consonant remaining
ص, ض (ṣ, ḍ/Tsad ) merged into only ḍ/Tsad consonant remaining
ع, غ (3'ayn, Ghayn) merged into a reducted ayin consonant remaining
ت, ث (t/taw, th) merged into only t/taw consonant remaining
|Classical Arabic | 28 consonants, 29 with Hamza and 6 vowels; some consonants are emphatic or pharyngealized; some vowels are marked with diacritics | Complex system of word formation based on roots and patterns; roots are sequences of consonants that carry the basic meaning of a word; patterns are sequences of vowels and affixes that modify the meaning and function of a word | Flexible word order, but VSO is most common; SVO is also possible; subject and object are marked by case endings (-u for nominative, -a for accusative, -i for genitive); verb agrees with subject in person, number, and gender; verb has different forms for different moods and aspects |
| Akkadian | 22 consonants and 3 vowels; some consonants are glottalized or palatalized; vowels are not marked | Similar system, but with different roots and patterns; some roots have more than three consonants; some patterns have infixes or reduplication | Fixed word order of SVO; subject and object are not marked by case endings, but by prepositions or word order; verb agrees with subject in person, number, and gender; verb has different forms for different tenses and aspects |
| Aramaic | 22 consonants and 3 vowels (later variants have more); no emphatic or pharyngealized consonants (except in some dialects); vowels are not marked (except in later variants such as Syriac) | Simple system of word formation based on prefixes and suffixes; some roots or patterns exist, but are less productive than in Arabic or Akkadian |
"Semitic" is just mumbled Arabic, really. Imagine English with a third of its letters removed and simplified grammar. That's Aramaic, Hebrew, etc. For example, combine T and D into just T; there's no need to have 2 letters. The same goes for i, e, y - they should all be just y from now on, etc., etc. Arabic is the only corollary to proto-Semitic. In fact, the whole classification of Semitic languages is nonsensical for anyone with a somewhat functioning brain. Hebrew, Aramaic, and the rest of these made-up dialect continua only have 22 letters out of the 29 proto-Semitic letters. Arabic has all 29. The difference between Arabic and the other creoles and Pidgin is the same as the difference between Latin and pig Latin or Italian. "Phoenician" is an Arabic dialect continuum, and not only that, it is pidgin. It is simplified to the point of stupidity. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Arabic would see this clearly. What happened was that Arabic handicapped "scholars" saw the equivalent of Scottish Twitter spelling, with added mumbling due to phonemic mergers (22 letters, not 29), and mistakenly thought they were seeing a different language."
Finally, let's look at a more complex sentence: The letter was written with a pen. How would you say it in different Semitic languages?
## The letter was written with a pen
Arabic:
كُتِبَتِ الرِّسَالَةُ بِالقَلَمِ
kutiba-t al-risāla-t-u bi-l-qalam-i
Proto-Semitic:
*kutiba-t ʔal-risāla-t-u bi-l-qalam-i
Hebrew:
המכתב נכתב בעט
ha-michtav niktav ba-et
Akkadian:
šipram šapāru bēlum
Egyptian:
sḏm.n.f p-ẖry m rnp.t
Berber:
tturra-t tibratin s uccen
In the examples Arabic and Proto-Semitic have the same word order (verb-subject-object), the same passive voice marker (-t-), the same definite article (al-), and the same preposition (bi-). Hebrew has changed the word order (subject-verb-object), lost the passive voice marker, changed the definite article (ha-) and the preposition (ba-). Akkadian has changed the word order (object-subject-verb), lost the passive voice marker, changed the definite article (-um) and the preposition (bēlum).
These examples show that classical Arabic has more consonants and vowels than other semitic languages, and that it preserves some sounds that were lost or changed in other semitic languages. This means that classical Arabic can encode more information in a given unit of speech than other semitic languages, and that it is closer to the original sound system of protosemitic., we can see that classical Arabic has more grammatical features than the other languages, such as case endings, mood endings, and root and pattern system. These features make classical Arabic more expressive and precise than the other languages, as it can convey more information and nuances in a single word or phrase. Classical Arabic is also more flexible than the other languages, as it can use different word orders and verb forms to emphasize different aspects of the sentence. Classical Arabic is therefore older and more original than the other languages. "Semitic" is just mumbled Arabic, really. Imagine English with a third of its letters removed and simplified grammar. That's Aramaic, Hebrew, etc. For example, combine T and D into just T; there's no need to have 2 letters. The same goes for i, e, y - they should all be just y from now on, etc., etc. Arabic is the only corollary to proto-Semitic. In fact, the whole classification of Semitic languages is nonsensical for anyone with a somewhat functioning brain. Hebrew, Aramaic, and the rest of these made-up dialect continua only have 22 letters out of the 29 proto-Semitic letters. Arabic has all 29. The difference between Arabic and the other creoles and Pidgin is the same as the difference between Latin and pig Latin or Italian. "Phoenician" is an Arabic dialect continuum, and not only that, it is pidgin. It is simplified to the point of stupidity. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Arabic would see this clearly. What happened was that Arabic handicapped "scholars" saw the equivalent of Scottish Twitter spelling, with added mumbling due to phonemic mergers (22 letters, not 29), and mistakenly thought they were seeing a different language."
The Aramaic word for God is Alaha. It's the word Isa PBUH (jesus as his name is often misspelled due to lack of the ayin sound in greek which was rendered to iesous coupling the nearest sound to ayin, same letter found in 'iraq' , which sound entirely different in Arabic form 'iran' in Arabic, with the -ous greek suffix that greeks typically add to their names 'herodotOUS and later mumbled into a j) Sounds familiar? Written without the confusing vowels it is A-L-H ܐ ܠܗܐ (alap-lamed-he) as found in found in Targum or in Tanakh (Danel, Ezra), Syriac Aramaic (Peshitta) adducted from the Arabic original of which aramaic is a dialect continuum of A-L-L-H (Aleph-Lam-Lam-Ha).
Matter of fact that all this, and the knowledge needed for deciphering ancient texts and the complexity all of it was derived from the Qur'an, it was by analysing the syntactic structure of the Quran that the Arabic root system was developed, first attested to in Kitab Al-Ayin, the first intralanguage dictionary of its kind, preceding the Oxford English dictionary by 800 years, that the concept of Arabic root was developed and later co-opted into "semitic root" that the ancient scripts were deciphered, they quite literally copy pasted the entirey of Arabic root. hebrew had been dead, and so were all the other dialects of Arabic until being "revived" in a frankensteinian fashion in the 18th, 19th centuries. The whole region spoke basically the same language, mumbled dialect continuums spread about, and Arabic is the oldest form from which all these dialects branched off. As time passed, the language became more degenerate and then the Quran appears with the oldest form possible of the language thousands of years later It is why the Arabs back then were challenged to produce 10 verses similar, and they couldnt. People think it's a miracle becau'e they couldnt do it, but I think the miracle is the language itself, they had never spoken Arabic, nor has any other language before or since had this mathematical precision behind it. And I quite literally mean, mathematical.
Now how is it that the Qur'an came thousands of yeara later in an alphabet that had never been recorded before and in the highest form the language had ever taken and the language is lexically, syntactically, phonemically and semantically older than the oldest recorded writing, infact, that writing appears to have been a simplified version of it, and not only that, but it would be the equivalent of the greatest works of any particular language all appearing in one book that in a perfect script and in the highest form the language could ever take, so high infact it is theoretically not possible to surpass it all in a script that had never been recorded before and so the enlightenment of mankind from barbarism and savagery began
and age of reason and rationality was born from its study
God did bring down the Qur’an, Mohamed is his Messenger.
I speak both Hebrew and Yiddish (and am learning Ladino) - but Yiddish is my first language (I think in it) - and we have a Yiddish-only rule here at home. Front door closes, no more English. As a kid, I lived in Birobidzhan, USSR - the Soviets simplified the Hebrew/Yiddish alefbeis - no final letters, no Hebrew-only letters like Veis, Tov and Sov, and all words from Hebrew were spelled phonetically. All books, the newspaper Birobidzhaner Shtern, and the magazine Sovetish Hejmland were printed using the Soviet orthography. Not going to lie, it was a lot easier to read! LOL When the USSR collapsed, that orthography was dropped. My daughter-in-law is from Corfu, from a family that still speaks Ladino as their first language (my Yiddish-speaking son & her have it mandated in their K'suveh that their kids will speak Yiddish and Ladino, THEN learn Hebrew later (they live in Israel). ANYHOW... they write Ladino with another modified Hebrew alefbeis that's halfway between Hebrew and Yiddish - though apparently that's only common in Israel now, as in Greece, Turkey, Bosnia, etc. they use Roman letters (apparently the Turks mandated they switch).
This is very interesting to read, thanks. I did not imagine that there would still be people speaking Ladino in Corfu.
Which letters are the Hebrew-only letters that you mention?
Lol we have over a thousand years worth of Judeo-German or Yiddish texts, but the Soviets decided it was best to change it 😅 (wasn't it they who also decided jews would be best apart and needing shunting off to the extreme edge of the Russian far east, (next to freaking China, and with wild Tigers roaming around, yup perfect.) to build that travesty of a place, mostly populated by goyim and less than 10% Jews? I think I saw a documentary, like streets named Sholem aleichem st, or some such nonsense 🤔
And wow big surprise, after their inevitable fall it was changed back lmfao 🤣 typically Russian
Well, Ladino is descended from Old Spanish, so it should use the Latin alphabet. On the other hand, Yiddish is descended from Middle High German and for some reason uses the Hebrew alphabet (seemingly the hardest part of Yiddish is the alphabet). I know there are transliterations of Yiddish, but its spelling system is a bit odd; the other day, I learned that the transliterated version of Yiddish for "for example" is "tsum bayshpil", which sounds exactly like German "zum Beispiel", but is spelled very oddly.
Wow, a real jew from Birobidzhan! As a Russian I always thought "jewish autonomous oblast" was a USSR gov joke and it had no jews in it. I even lived not that far away, in Amur oblast. Sadly the region is not very known nowadays and the people are leaving it for better places.
If in Greece, has there been any interaction with romanyote/yevanitika and if so how is it in comparison to ladino, yiddish, hebrew, etc.? Is the Hebrew abjad used, is the Hellenic alphabet used, or is the Latin script still used the same as you mentioned above?
as a native hebrew speaker who grew up rarely writing and had to learn individual words at a later age, i came up with a few strategies for these irregularities (which are valid at least in native hebrew words)
1) alef/ayin (word-initially or medially): unfortunately, this one is guesswork. try alef though, it's slightly more common
2) alef/ayin/he (word-finally): he is waaay more common than alef. word-final alef is usually only found when it is part of the root or in aramaic loanwords. word-final ayin makes an extra /a/ sound after the final vowel, so unless the final vowel is /a/, you can tell if it's an ayin. this way you can differentiate between /ho'dia/ and /hoda'ja/
3) soft bet/vav: if /v/ appears word-initially, it's written with a vav. if it appears word-finally, it's probably a bet
4) hard kaf/kuf: if /k/ appears word-finally, it's written with a kuf (except some arabic loanwords and some acronyms)
5) soft kaf/khet: if /x/ appears word-initially, it's written with a khet. also, word-final khet adds an /a/ before it (like ayin). this way, you can differentiate between /o'reax/ and /'orex/
6) samekh/sin: samekh is much more common. if you have to guess, guess samekh
7) tet/tav: mostly guesswork, but affixes with /t/ are written with tav. the only case in which /t/ in an affix is written with a tet is in special cases in the hitpa'el stem in which tav becomes tet
it's hellish, but you learn to get by :) hope this helps!
I think abjad is quite a suitable writing system for Hebrew cuz it's easy to recognize the root and understand the meaning quickly
Thanks, man. Hebrew writing and reading just kills me.
It's just mumbled Arabic, really. Imagine English with a third of its letters removed, and simplified grammar. Thats hebrew. For example, combine T,D into just T no need to have 2 letters. Same for i, e, y they all should be just y from now on, etc etc. "
8) In words loaned from foreign languages: ת replaces "th", ט replaces "t". In those loaned words, "k" is spelled mostly with ק and "s" is spelled replaced by ס (samekh). That is why you have תאטרון (theatre), or מתמטיקה (mathematics), or סטודנט (student).
9) It is impossible for "P" to appear at the end of an original Hebrew word, so you cannot have "peh sofit". In the rare loaned words, where P appears at the end, regular "peh" is written instead: טופ, פופ etc.
Finnish is almost 100% phonetic, only changing now with young peoples dialectization, yet normal official Finnish writing is a joy since you can speak and write correctly just after learning each letter sound
You are describing phonetic orthography. Polish language also has phonetic orthography. English language obviously does not - its spelling is bad joke.
@garyallen8824That doesn't change the fact that its writing "rules" are a mess.
English is crazy. That's what I tell my Asian students learning Stinklish.
KJV English is epic though.@garyallen8824
IMHO, inglish wudnt pöhäps bii sou kuul if it häd ö "finnishd" speling? 🥴
@@arjuna-fn2pg There is a really cool phonetic english alphabet ruclips.net/video/D66LrlotvCA/видео.html
4:00: That box on the left is hillarious! For those not in the know, it's part of a standard form employees in Israel have to fill in every year for tax purposes, and this particular box has such convoluted and unclear terminology that nobody really knows how to fill it in correctly. A great illustration!
As a native Hebrew speaker, I actually like this language a lot, even the dumb writing system. The nikkud is actually an integral part of the writing system, we just usually don't write it and keep it hidden. As such, there are a lot of grammar rules that almost no native speakers know, some of which will probably explain a few examples from your video. My actual hate for the Hebrew language comes from the gender part. I have never seen such harsh grammatical gender, it's genuinely the worst. A bunch of native speakers make a lot of mistakes in it as well. It's still a fascinating language in my opinion. I really enjoyed the video, thanks!
One of the most impressive feats I ever saw in language was when my Hebrew professor wrote a long sentence out on the blackboard and then went back to the beginning and added in all the points! I could never get past writing one letter then pointing it and moving on to the next letter. 😢
הטעויות הכי נפוצות שראיתי בעברית הן. "אני יעשה" "במקום אני אעשה", "שלושה נקבות" "במקום שלוש נקבות", הניקוד אף פעם לא מוסבר/מבוטא. וכמעט כל ישראלי ורוסי מתבלבלים בביטוי האותיות א' ו-ע'.
@@natantitelbaum6061 מסכימה עם הכל, למרות שאני לא זוכרת ששמעתי הרבה טעויות בין א' וע'. למרות שיש הרבה טעויות בין זכר ונקבה בפעלים מדוברי רוסית
Nikkud is *not* part of the writing system. The Torah never had any of it. It's a later invention, probably borrowed from some other semitic language.
i'd laugh in three-gendered german, but not only is that a bit macabre, you also could easily defeat me be throwing the word Nutella at me.. or Joghurt.. or Kartoffel.. or Butter..
as someone who's learning Hebrew I feel vindicated that someone else hates how confusing vav is
If this makes you feel better, at least in Sephardic Hebrew, the letter bag doesn't make the /v/ sound (unless it's the Greek Sephardic dialect), so it's either /o~u/ or /w/. And the letter Ayin makes the /ŋ/ sound for some reason. The Sephardic dialect from North Africa, and some regions next to Israel are more conservative though, and the letters Gimmel, Daleth, and Tav have their two pronunciations g~ɣ, d~ð, t~θ respectively.
When I started learning hebrew I expected a very easy writing system, because I thought surely they would reform the writing system so it would be easier for all the people from different linguistic backgrounds needing to learn the language. Boy was I wrong. It's a shame because it was a great opportunity. Once you have millions of books written in it, it's very hard to reform.
The irony though is that it hasn't been successfully reformed because of one (1) book only. :)
@@olterigoWhy would the torah effect spelling reform, doesn't change the meaning of the text
@@memeboi6017 Because every Sabbath and Jewish holiday, religious Jews in synagogues read Torah from a parchment scroll. Those scrolls to be kosher (for the synagogal reading) have to be written by hand, and get copied letter by letter from a prior scroll. Many religious Jews believe there's a mystical reason for letters to be written the way they are, including the final letters.
@@olterigo Then you'd think they'd go the Arabic route and just choose the most conservative pronunciation (that sounds (more or less) the way the language sounded when Torah was written) as the basis for the standard language.
@@2712animefreak I agree with you in general, but in Eastern European Orthodox Judaism the reality is that sometimes tradition/custom becomes the rule and you need a very authoritative rabbi to change it back to what it originally is supposed to be. That's why some really religious Jews, still dress like their ancestors 10 generations ago - the customary outfits became "holy" if you will (plus they keep them different from the rest of the society).
This was kind of the point when us Turks switched to Latin alphabet because the Arabic abjad gave Turkish the same problems and we have much more vowels in our words.
Well at that time, I wouldn't think of any other writing system could have been used for Hebrew, thinking about the political climate of the era.
Well, it's my understanding that Turkish phonology is more suited to the Latin alphabet. Aside from ı /ɯ/, all the sounds in Turkish occur in common Indo-European languages. Though, I do appreciate that Azerbaijani distinguishes between e /e/ and ə /æ/, where Turkish uses e for both sounds.
@@ghenulo Well, Uyghur, Kazakh (in PRC) and Kyrgyz (in PRC) use Arabic script but the system is a proper alphabet. The Ottoman system was indeed problematic, but Kemal decided to westernize the country. Probably, if the Ottoman system was still around, it would be heavily modified like the Uyghur system.
I taught myself the Hebrew alphabet teaching myself some Yiddish, which I can sort of read, mostly because it sounds like German, though by painstakingly sounding it out. Yiddish, at least with the standard sort of spelling, fixes most of the problems you talk about. It writes *all* the vowels. There's only one t, k , s, etc., for "native" word at lest; words from Hebrew are spelled like Hebrew. My problem is too many characters look alike, daled looks resh, vov looks like zayin looks like final nun, bet looks like kaf, mem looks like samech, etc. The differences are just a little tick, or a square vs. rounded corner, which depending on the font and size of text can be very hard to see. And for someone like me who can't really read, but sounds things out letter by letter, it's infuriating not being able to tell the letters apart.
Great points! It’s not great for Yiddish either, but still somehow way better than modern Hebrew.
I've been playing around with the new Yiddish course on Duolingo, and I've dabbled in Hebrew, it does seem much easier to read Yiddish than Hebrew. I will try to conquer Hebrew again someday, but right now I am having a lot of fun with Yiddish.
Wow kudos to you dude. I kinda agree, I mean designation helps, so knowing e.g Alef is A and Ayin is an E makes things much simpler from the outset. The problem with Yiddish is the letter combos are kinda weird to English speakers. So as in say the word (T)Chepper meaning to bother or annoy, the spelling is Tes Shiyen (and you have to know its somehow shiyen not a siyen, or I guess they'd use samech??) to someone self taught (and without nikkud help) it was curious adaptation from the Hebrew to have to master
Yes, you'd always use a semech, not siyen, unless it's a word of Hebrew origin, but those don't have the tch sound.
My grandfather and father spoke Yiddish , but couldn't read or write it.Recall my dad saying if you can speak German,you can learn Yiddish.My dad was German and spoke it with a Berliner accent.
Very funny. I am a Hebrew teacher to American students and I think you are hilarious. Students do figure out somewhat how to read aloud, but it comes from intensive exposure. However, having to listen to them read aloud or reading their compositions require tons of patience and compassion. The more you read the better you will become at spelling without nikud.
There is Th sound in Ancient hebrew like in English but not in Arabic nobody use it but it better ti start sound Dalet without Dagesh like MoTHer faTHer real Tav without dagesh not from Ashkenuses THink or THanks Gimel without dagesh like Turkish hard G
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as someone learning Hebrew, I want you to continue making more vids about the nuances of Hebrew because your rants make it stick! thanks. can you differentiate the sounds and use of tet versus tav and Chet vs qof vs kaf
For best understanding of Hebrew writing/reading - best to understand concept of משקל and בניין - and of course roots. How actually words are build. Once you get it everything will be way clearer. Grammar is very important tool.
That it would be natural to understand and remember meaning of stuff like: לִכְתוֹב, כָּתַבָה, כִּתִיבָה, מִכְתָב, כַתָב
No I believe for proper analysis one NEEDS to be able to isolate the Shoresh, if you can extract the 3 letter root it becomes much easier to understand a word and it's pronounciation and usage. That's how we were taught as little kids, (Yiddish however was never taught, just spoken, so learning to read fluently was much harder.)
Hm. I have a hard time picturing anyone wanting to learn Hebrew. Arabic maybe, but Hebrew?
To your last request: ט and ת both just make a /t/ sound nowadays. Historically, one of them made the /th/ sound (way back in the Iron Age, that was the ט, which is why the Greek theta still makes that sound, but more recently it was the ת, which further shifted to /s/ in Yiddish. You sometimes get /th/ translitterated as ת or 'ת in Hebrew today.
The letter ק makes the /k/ sound, and the letter ח makes a so-called "hard h" (like the French kh, Spanish and Russian x, German ch, as in "Bach"), while כ can make both sounds (always a /k/ at the start of a word, except in a couple of relatively recent loanwords from Greek; always a hard h when it's in its word-final forn, ך). If you have nikkud, a /k/ will always appear as כּ, with that dot in the middle.
Now, historically, those were actually different sound qualities. Most Arabic dialects still preserve the distinction between the sound of a quf (note the q in the transliteration) and a kaf, and the hard h of ח is meant to be glottal, not velar, as in כ, again, a difference still heard in Arabic, but only preserved in very few Modern Hebrew sub-dialects.
"semitic" is just mumbled Arabic, really.
Imagine English with a third of its letters removed, and simplified grammar. Thats Aramaic, hebrew, etc. For example, combine T,D into just T no need to have 2 letters. Same for i, e, y they all should be just y from now on, etc etc.
Arabic is the only corollary to proto-semitic, infact the whole semitic classification is nonsensical for anyone with a somewhat functioning mass between their ears. hebrew, aramaic, rest of madeup dialect continua only have 22 letters of the 29 protosemitic lettersz Arabic has all 29. The difference betweeen Arabic and the other creoles and Pidgin is the same as that between Latin and pig latin or italian.
"phoenician" is an Arabic dialect continuum, not only that, it is pidgin. It's simplified to the point of stupidity, anyone with a basic knowledge of Arabic would see this evidently clear.
What happened was, Arabic handicapped "scholars" saw the equivalent of scottish twitter spelling, with added mumbling by way of phonemic mergers (22 letters not 29) and thought themselves seeing a different language.
The main advantage of a single letter having 2 sounds is that the sound might change based on the conjugation of the word. Take כתבתי/katavti/ (I was writing) and אכתוב/eχtov/ (I will write). In one כ makes a k sound and in the other כ makes a h sound. When reading you will immediately recognize they are both of the root כ.ת.ב, (writing)
In the beginning כ is 99.99% k and in the end ב is 99.99% v. This can change in some foreign words
You make it sound so difficult, while it really isn't. Not worse, for instance, than Polish with which I grew up at home, while using Hebrew all around. BTW, a famous Hebrew linguist, Uzi Ornan dared to mention that modern Hebrew should change its alphabet to the Latin one. He was opposed by all...
It's good to know that those who have to suffer English writing aren't alone. Didnt know the Thai alphabet was irregular.
I saw a video about the Tibetan alphabet... turns out it was pretty good when it was invented, but they kept the same alphabet and spelling across hundreds of years of linguistic drift, so now it's very unwieldy.
An equally confusing system existed among some Tibetan-Buddhist Manchus about 200-300 years ago, who transcribed Tibetan sutras in a way that roughly stands halfway between how it is originally spelled and how it was spoken around Lhasa at the time. For example, the word _dbus_ is pronounced like a German ü now, but they wrote it as _us_ in Manchu letters and pronounced it _ui._
Well, I'm glad you're back and making videos again.
I studied Hebrew myself for a while, but I don't remember it well, although I sometimes read it.
When talking about all the et's and at's you could have added:
עת - time
את (חפירה) - shovel
צחקתי ממש כשראיתי את הסרטון שלך, כדובר שפת אם עברית לא חשבתי אף פעם על מה שהצגת בסרטון אבל אתה צודק, זה כנראה ממש קשה ללמוד לקרוא עברית.
As someone who has learnt Biblical Hebrew for my degree many years ago I feel the pain lol. I don't know Arabic at all but I also learnt Syriac for my degree and that was far worse! Half the letters were nothing but blobs until I got used to them and even worse I had to learn more than one script depending on the dialect of the text! Still, I really enjoyed learning it and it was amazing how easy it was after one or two glasses of sherry lol.
There's nothing like Semitic languages with sherry.
Too true lol. In my defence I was much younger then as I graduated in 1992! I can't believe how long ago that was now...
I was under the impression that biblical hebrew was far more confusing in respect to reading comprehension and relies heavily on memorization because so many of the words have a dozen or more literal translations or uses and other reasons. My grandparents were insistent that I learned Yiddish and German as a child
Thankfully it wasn't really as bad as that because although many of the words have different meanings, and different shades of meaning, the context was a good guide.@@sidvicious6505
@@sidvicious6505yea. Biblical Hebrew was even harder than modern one
The letters alef and ayin have been pronounced as consonants for 1500 years of Iraqi, Moroccan, and Yemeni liturgical Hebrew. Specifically, as a voiceless glottal stop and a voiced pharyngeal fricative, respectively. Only in the very recent and heavily Europeanized (Yiddish-and Ladino-influenced) Modern Israeli Hebrew have these two letters come to represent vowel-only sounds.
To read שלמה as shakshuka??? You made my day, dude! :)
Uncle Shakshuka who sells falafel, right?
Однажды на уроке иврита моя подруга вместо неба начитала наркотики (самим вместо шамаим), и это просто постоянно. У меня за плечами 9 лет изучения языка в школе и сдан внутренний школьный экзамен на пятерку, но я все ещё не решаюсь прочитать хоть что-нибудь на иврите. Хотя, будем честны, на слух я его тоже сейчас вряд-ли пойму - все позабыла
Err dude, I'm not sure exactly HOW he did that because from my memory they have 2 completely different letters. Yes, a shiyen can be a Siyen, but drugs/Samim is spelled with a Samech and heaven/Shamayim is a Shiyen or Shin not a Siyen/sin 😉 of course I didn't learn in Cyrillic alphabet so perhaps that's the issue??
@@ABritInNY no, she just misspelled it. Because she forgot that she already know this word, so she tried her best an improvised. שמים is sky, but if you don't know how exactly read it, you can read it with sound s, not sh. And without symbols it is difficult to read it with "...aim", easier to "...im". So that's how shamaim (שמים) turned into samim(סמים)
You left out the Hebrew words for shovel and era - את and עת.
את - proposition
את - you (female)
את - shovel
עת - era/period/time
עט - pen
All, except the second one, are pronounced more or less the same as "ett" (этт)
Damn, so true, I forgot about those! Wish I added them in the video
בנוסף יש גם את המילים:
עט - at (התנפל)
אט - at (לאט)
סרטון מעולה אגב
I’m glad you clarified that you are speaking about modern Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew is perfect and extremely fun and beautiful to find double meanings of words. Also in Biblical Hebrew you don’t get the duplicate letters.
That’s true. In Biblical Hebrew, ט is not just a “T”. Its a “T” pronounced with your tongue in between your tongue.
And ח, it is not a hard “H”. It is the soft “H” with air coming from your vocal cord.
The letter ר should just be pronounced as like we normally say the letter “R”.
But idk why Modern Hebrew actually made a number of letters having redundant sounds 😢
As a native Arabic speaker i recently started learning Hebrew and it's crazy how its alphabet makes a lot of sense. ט=ط , ת=ت , ק=ق, צ=ص כ=ک ע=ع as everyone said these letters have lost its original pronunciation in modern Hebrew. really interesting things
If I remember correctly, the reason אמא and אבא have an א at the end is because they were taken from aramaic, where א at the end acts as the definite article "the". So it's kinda fun seeing remnants of other languages in the language
I was going to ask to what degree are these issues are caused by Hebrew taking an already existing alphabet (Aramaic) in which to write it?
Yeah the native Hebrew words for parents should be אב Av and אם Em
Thank you so much for this video!
Decade after decade, I have started at odd moments making yet another attempt at overcoming the first hurdle towards learning Hebrew, the fact that shin is the only letter I can recognise, while most of the rest fall into three classes, with any letter possibly being any other letter in the same class.
You have now saved me from wasting hours adding up to days trying to overcome my inability, because it would be f*@/ing pointless! The second step would be just as hopeless as the first!
As for French, I spent a lot more time on failing, because of the seemingly familiar easily distinguishable letters, but quickly discovered the two principle rules of the language:
1. The vowels can't be pronounced.
2. The consonants mustn't be pronounced.
And now I must stop, because my blood pressure is rising, too.
Most of your criticism of hebrew applies to persian as well lol
S = س ث ص
T = ط ت
Z = ز ذ ض ظ
And a few more options lol
Short vowels are not written causing confusion
We also use A ا (alef) for placeholder of short or long vowels
Our vav (we also call it that) is also the word for O, U and V (we dont have W waw sound)
I think the same spunding letters is useful cause its different sounding in arabic and it means different word
Asās is how we say اثاث and اساس
But they mean different things so when qritten it can help differentiate it
Sounding*
I support writing short vowels and to diversify the sounds. It will help both native and foreign speakers
You use Arabic alphabet it is a Semitic language just like Hebrew
@@sisjnwjwk7832Persian is info European it’s closer to English then Hebrew
@@abdimalikelmi729 the alphabet is Arabic
Its same with Arabic btw but there are very subtle differences a native would be able to tell. (For example with the ث , u bring ur tongue out, unlike س ) Idk if this is the case with Farsi
14:16 French writing system is actually pretty easy
at least it haves consistent rules unlike English
I learned it by singing songs from Notre Dame De Paris
The nice thing about French is that it's nearly a monosyllabic language. Every word is (consonant) + "eau"...
So much of what is said here reflects the poster's lack of knowledge of Hebrew's history. I, too, got the erroneous education of what sounds the letters make* that he repeats here, but having since learned how the letters originally sounded, I don't find the lettering so bizarre.
I was amused to see shakshuka thrown in there at 15:50. 😉
*For example, he doesn't (& in my childhood I didn't) know that just as with the ב and the פ, the ג, the ד, and the ת have different sounds depending on whether they have an emphasis dot (a _dagesh_ ) in them. But in practice these were lost in the last few centuries of exile (except in some Arabic and Yemenite communities).
9:40 - Seemingly a little known fact: When Arabic names/words are transliterated into Hebrew, ح (H) is transliterated into just ח (KH), and ח' actually means خ (kh), because that's the Mizrahi pronounciation.
And these do actually exist - ד' for some things, ת' like for "Houthis" (חות'ים, which people turn into חותים - Khootim), ח' for any time the arabic خ exists, and... Well, ע' is the reason that غزة (Gaza) is ע'זה -> עזה.
11:00 there is also the word for "Shovel" which is אֵת (et) as well
Another really cool example is the story of שֶׁלָמָה שְׁלֹמֹה שַׂלְמָה שְׁלֵמָה שִׁלֵּמָה but that's for really advanced speakers
Earlier "gimel" was both [g] and [غ], "dalet" was [d] and [ð], "tav" was [t] and [θ]. Nowadays this distinction still exists in Syriac dialects and in Arabic, but not in Hebrew.
Can't speak to the gimel situation since [g] doesn't exist in all dialects, and is always represented by different letters, but I can confirm as an Arabic speaker that د [d] (daal) and ذ [ð] (thaal) exhibit this, as well as ت [t] (taa') and ث [θ] (thaa')
As far as [g], my native Egyptian has that represented by ج (jeem), which in MSA makes a [dʒ] sound. Some will represented by a ق (qaaf), which in MSA is a [q] and in Egyptian is a [ʔ]۔The velar fricative [ɣ] (or something similar) is always represented by غ (ghain) though
@@largefam3109That’s true. Though the Arabic alifbaa didn’t have separate letters for each pronunciation at the very beginning. For example, the letter pronounced [θ] was just the same letter as [t].
If I remember correctly, [b] and [n] were also represented by that letter.
It seems like in the Hebrew alphabet they did not end up adding new letters to separate one sound from another, instead they differentiated them with nikkud.
I thought tet was supposed to be the th sound.
@@ferretyluv No, tet (according to the most widely accepted version) was the same sound as "ta" (a letter with a long vertical bar) in Arabic.
@@aurasphere01 Yeah, sounds about right. Older versions of the Arabic script didn't have dots, so ت، ث، ب، ن (t, th, b, n) would look identical (ن would as well at the beginning/midle of a word)
I am less concerned about these annoyances, my personal problem is that after more than 20 years of speaking Hebrew I still can't read it since all the letters looks the same to me 🤕For example, it is near to impossible to differentiate between the vav and nun in most of the modern fonts, and usually it also extends to gimel and zain as well. You really have to double check all these barely visible glyph details, - but in many fonts the designers consciously make them almost unrecognizable. The same is with bet and kaf (not mentioning that nun, gimel and zain are sometimes getting almost as fat as bet or kaf), mem and pei and samekh (sometime looking just indistinguishable from bet 😩) - I probably can go further but these are the most obvious cases. I don't really blame the language here - I blame the font designers, they just have to pull their heads out of their asses and admit that the modern Hebrew fonts are result of misuse of Latin typography in a totally foreign script system, that the Blackletter typing system is not only not applicable to Hebrew, it is not used even in the Western typography for the last century, the last one that used it were Nazis, but even they abandoned it by 1944 - but the modern Hebrew typography is still using Blackletter-inspired fonts as the base for the typing system.
Thanks for the video. As a native speaker, you don't really get to think about those things. This explains why so many foreigners and new olim have trouble grasping writing and spelling. Like you said, some words feel as if they're constructed in a way that there's no logic behind the spelling, and all you can do really is memorize.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the confusion with the letter ח when it comes at the end of a word and pronounced as "ach" instead, in words such as תפוח, בטוח, רוקח etc..
It's easy to apply once you understand it, but extremely unintuitive for new learners.
Also, letters ט and ת have a bit of nuance to them that I noticed when they're used in words that are borrowed from foreign languages (mainly english). Usually if there's "th", in Hebrew it'll be transcribed as ת
While "t" is exclusively ט
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As a French native speaker I couldn’t watch this video and not say anything. First, thanks for these 15 minutes of fun. I actually tried to learn Hebrew once and I quite enjoyed it to be honest, even with its writing complexity. Maybe that’s because my own language is worse ^^.
As for the Arabic abjad, I think it evolved from Palmyrene or Syriac script (themselves coming from Aramaic/Hebrew script) but it created more letters by adding different dots above or under the writing line in order to differentiate the phonemes. So it has been naturally adapted to the language and thus, it makes more sense in the phonographic logic.
Modern Hebrew however, lost some original Ancient Hebrew sounds (like the ע which lost its glottal characteristic /ʔ/, but still existing in Arabic) and characters like כ /k/ and ק /q/ (or ח /ħ/ and כ /x/) were actually not pronounced exactly the same in ancient time. As for the use in Modern Hebrew, I think it still makes sense to keep on using these characters for different reasons. Many roots might be understandable thanks to these characters, even if the pronunciation is distant. Also, it might help read classics (like Ancient Hebrew) and get closer to its understanding. If you turn the whole system into a 100% phonetic script, you might lose a lot of written comprehension and lexical or etymological connections. And finally, a spoken language always evolves with time. So you might find it cool to use a phonetic spelling at some point but in few generations, the pronunciation might have evolved again so your ‘new’ spelling will eventually become outdated one day anyway.
As a linguist and onetime Hebrew learner, I validate your rant! I learned Chinese, Japanese, Korean which is a whole different world.
As a friend and student of ancient Near Eastern languages I have to agree with you.
If only we pronounced, or _knew how to_ pronounce, the sounds correctly in the academia. Alas, they are dead languages, so nobody cares just for the anality of it
which makes it difficult for us who would thrive on said level of anality......
If those beautitful pharyngeals and emphatics were pronounced as they used to be, a lot (if not most) of all this mess would've been nonexistent. And, in my own and private opinion, Hebrew language with those phonemes just sounds WAY better to my ears
This is fascinating. Are you familiar with Devanagari? Used for Sanskrit, Hindi, and other Indian languages. It's just gorgeous. Not just how it looks, but how it works. It's consistent and logical, and the order of letters is even based on how they're made in the mouth. If you can read it, you can say it.
Really?
How many vowel sounds does it have?
@@victorb9763 short vowels, 5 long vowels, 2 short syllabic consonants, 1 long syllabic consonant, and 2 diphthongs.
Salam, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace.
In The Name Of God, Most Compassionate, Most Gracious.
It was We who revealed the Torah (to Moses); therein was guidance and light. By its standard have been judged the Jews, by the Prophet who bowed (as in Islam) to Allah’s will, by the Rabbis and the Doctors of Law: for to them was entrusted the protection of Allah’s Book, and they were witnesses thereto: therefore fear not men, but fear Me, and sell not My Signs for a miserable price. (Quran, 5:44)
Truly Pharaoh elated himself in the land and broke up its people into sections depressing a group among them: their sons he slew, but he kept alive their females: for he was indeed a maker of mischief. (28:4)
So We sent this inspiration to the mother of Moses: “Suckle (thy child) but when thou hast fears about him cast him, into the river, but fear not nor grieve: for We shall restore him to thee, and We shall make him one of Our messengers.” (28:7)
The wife of Pharaoh said: “(Here is) a joy of the eye for me and for thee: slay him not. It may be that he will be of use to us, or we may adopt him as a son.” And they perceived not (what they were doing)! (28:9)
Thus did We restore him to his mother that her eye might be comforted, that she might not grieve and that she might know that the promise of Allah is true: but most of them do not understand. (28:13)
But when he came to the (Fire), a voice was heard from the right bank of the valley, from a tree in hallowed ground: “O Moses! Verily I am Allah the Lord of the Worlds…” (28:30)
And when the two bodies saw each other, the people of Moses said: “We are sure to be overtaken.” (Moses) said: “By no means! My Lord is with me! Soon will He guide me!” Then We told Moses by inspiration: “Strike the sea with thy rod.” So it divided, and each separate part became like the huge, firm mass of a mountain. And We made the other party approach thither. We delivered Moses and all who were with him; but We drowned the others. Verily in this is a Sign: but most of them do not believe. And verily thy Lord is He, the Exalted in Might, Most Merciful. (26:61-68)
And We made a people, considered weak (and of no account), inheritors of lands in both East and West - lands whereon We sent down Our blessings. The fair promise of thy Lord was fulfilled for the Children of Israel, because they had patience and constancy, and we leveled to the ground the great works and fine buildings which Pharoah and his people erected (with such pride). (7:137)
And We ordained laws for him in the Tablets in all matters, both commanding and explaining all things (and said): “Take these and hold these with firmness, and enjoin thy people to hold fast by the best in the precepts.” (7:145)
…Aaron said: “Son of my mother! The people did indeed reckon me as naught, and went near to slaying me! Make not the enemies rejoice over my misfortune, nor count thou me amongst the people of sin.” (7:150)
And remember, Moses said to his people: “O my people! Why do ye vex and insult me, though ye know that I am the messenger of Allah (sent) to you?” (61:5)
He said: “O my Lord! I have power only over myself and my brother: so separate us from this rebellious people!” (5:25)
Salam, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace.
Idol Worship is prohibited in Hinduism not in a single place....
It is mentioned in Svetashvatara Upanishad chapter 4 verse 19 As well as in:
“There is no image of Him”
(Svetashvatara Upanishad 4:19)
It is mentioned in Yajurved Chapter 32 Verse 3
“There is no image of Him”
(Yajurved 32:3)
It is also mentioned in
Yajurveda Chapter 40 verse 9
“They enter darkness those who worship natural things (for e.g. air, water, fire, etc.). They sink deeper in darkness those who worship sambhuti i.e. created things (for e.g. table, chair, car, idol etc.)
(Yajurved 40:9)
Idol worship, which is very common amongst the Hindus, is prohibited in Hinduism. It is mentioned in Bhagavad Gita Chapter 7 verse 20:
“Those whose intelligence has been stolen by material desires they worship demigods i.e. idols.(Bhagavad Gita 7:20)
* Hindu Scriptures: "There is only ONE God, not the second; not at all, not at all, not in the least bit."[Brahma Sutra]
* Hindu Scriptures: "He is ONE ONLY without a second." [Chandogya Upanishad 6:2:1]
Hindu Scriptures: " O friends, do not worship ANYBODY but Him, the Divine One. Praise Him ALONE."[Rigveda 8:1:1]
Hindu Scriptures: "I am the goal of life, the LORD and support of all, the inner witness, the abode of all. I am the only refuge, the ONE true friend; I am the beginning, the staying, and the end of creation; I am the womb and the eternal seed. I am heat; I give and withhold the rain. I am immortality and I am death; I am what is and what is not"[Bhagavad Gita 9:18-19]
Salam, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace.
Hebrew Alphabet Is Derived From Aramaic, Turned Into Squarer Shapes, Akin To Japanese Kanji And Korean Hangul, From Chinese, A Mere 1,500 Years Ago, At The Period Of Prophet Muhammad.
The Language Contains Arabic, Aramaic, Persian, Phoenician & Yiddish.
The Rabbi's Claim It Is The Oldest Language, But Why Is Arabic In Most Language's Instead Of Hebrew ?
A big advantage of keeping the Hebrew Alphabet as it is, is that you can read texts that were composed even thousands of years ago, and understand the meaning, although you would have great diffeculty understanding the speach of the authors.
Also, different traditions evolved among Jews as to how to read Hebrew. An Israeli can not understand an Ashkenazi rabbi from Brooklyn reading Hebrew, but both can look at the same page and understand perfectly.
A few years ago I would have agreed with you completely, I think. But actually I've come to see a kind of beauty in this type of redundancy and context-dependency. I learned a tiny bit of (biblical) Hebrew, and I felt that the writing is something you can quite quickly develop a feel for, as you also mentioned, and the redundant and ambiguous letters give each word a slightly different character, which makes them easier to remember and distinguish. Writing is a mnemonic tool, after all. Of course there are the occasional historical exceptions like שלמה but all in all, I think it's a really good system, hebrew texts are very compact, the letters look extremely cool..
Awesome vid, I personally really enjoy writing (not as much reading) in Hebrew. I sincerely admire the beauty of the letters (my favorite is mem sufit, just pure aesthetic perfection) but I definitely agree with the fact that I myself can be heard mumbling the correspondent of пиздец under my breath when I look up the pronunciation of a word after guessing it
The funny thing about conservative orthographies that no longer make sense, is that so often the main argument* for not fixing it and revising the spelling to something more phonetic is that it would make ancient texts (often written when it was still sensible) less readable to modern readers. Which I guess is. _an_ argument, but it's not a particularly good one because usually not only have the sounds changed since ancient times but grammar and meaning of words have changed, so the only thing you gain by not fixing the spelling is the ability to to read old texts out loud in a completely different pronunciation than it originally had while still not understanding most of it.
It doesn't even take much time, texts written in Norwegian in the 1800s which probably haven't even changed particularly much in sounds or spelling (because in Norway we do update the spelling fairly regularly to stay reasonably phonetic) the texts still require quite a bit of knowledge to be able to understand because they talk about a society that were very different.
Oh. I forgot my conclusion:
So the only "benefit" of not fixing the spelling is that it makes it marginally easier for scholars to decipher old texts, at the cost of having a harder time figuring out the pronunciation and having to learn more historical pronunciation rules etc. While if we throughout history had consistently spelled everything phonetically knowing the historical pronunciation would be easy and understanding old words would be marginally harder (though not much really, because we would be less likely to assume the modern meaning of a word if it's not looking identical anymore)
Preach brother!! As a Welshman who has an interest in Hebrew and been to Israel twice, I've just given up! I remember the uncalled for and embarrasing joy I felt when I managed to read 'kiosk' as that was one of the few words which I could learn without known context etc. Why didn't Ben Yehuda just decide to use bet for b only and then vav (or whatever for v). But put in the five vowels - and use those final letter for distinc sounds. Also, the letter, - except for the beautiful lamed (and kof) look too similar. I learnt Cyrillic - it's excellent. But Hebrew - so blinking frustrating. Not worth the bother. Welsh is written phonetically and we have mutations (where the first letter of a word can change depending on the context - it's a great frustration to Welsh speakers and learners .. but, at least someone can read every Welsh word clearly and mostly correctly within 5 minutes of studying!!). I share your pain and frustration - stupid, infuriating alphabet!
Salam, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace.
Hebrew Alphabet Is Derived From Aramaic, Turned Into Squarer Shapes, Akin To Japanese Kanji And Korean Hangul, From Chinese, A Mere 1,500 Years Ago, At The Period Of Prophet Muhammad.
The Language Contains Arabic, Aramaic, Persian, Phoenician & Yiddish.
The Rabbi's Claim It Is The Oldest Language, But Why Is Arabic In Most Language's Instead Of Hebrew ?
Gotta say that's kinda weird.
I'm a Hebrew native speaker + Hebrew teacher + I specialise in teaching kids with reading AND writing disabilities..
So I dare to assuma I know a thing or two how kids learn to read and write in Hebrew.
So here goes:
1. Sure, to a person who doesn't SPEAK hebrew, learning how to read without nikkud is VERY difficult.
2. Writing would be even more difficult, sure
3. However, if you TRULY are a native speaker, who is ALSO litterate, meaning you read a fair amount of Hebrew on a daily basis.. it is very unusual for you to find writing THAT difficult, unless you have a writing disability 🤷🏻♀️
The fact is, most Israelis write in hebrew without major difficulties.
The main misspellig would be switching ח with כ, and ע with א.. but even that usually only happens with very specific words..again, that is if you speak at a native level, and are also exposed to written Hebrew on a daily basis.
Exposure and repetition is key, as most of the words in our brains are not stored phonetically, but rather globally/ortographically, meaning remembering the word as a whole, and not analysing each sound every time you read or write the word..
So I'd suggest you read more (:
I'm a native speaker, in the early days of Israel there were differences in pronouncing ט and ת , also for כ and ק..
Today Israelis can't pronounce it, they shifted to more Ashkenazi (Caucasian like) pronouncing, they dropped the sounds of it to stay will the same sound but words kept be written differently. Even as young Israelis it is difficult but it has it past
I learned biblical Hebrew and we used the modern pronounciation during class.
I would have preferred the ancient (or reconstructed) pronounciation since it makes it easier to memorize some words and also helps understanding tonal rules. And there would not have been so many redundant letters.
How כ was pronounced? All i know that ת was like "th" sound
@@xplodkain with a dagesch it is a 'k' without dagesch it's a fricative like the 'ch' in the German word "Nacht"
"Y" sounding similar to the vowel "i" doesn't mean it's a vowel. "Y" makes sound /j/ (voiced palatal approximant), /ʝ/ (voiced palatal fricative) and /i/ (high front unrounded vowel), if you check the first two sounds they are consonantal (you close the vocal tract when pronouncing it) and /i/ regardless of its name it be either vowel or consonantal.
As a native hebrew speaker, the alphabet is very easy to use for most hebrew speakers, it is true that you just need to know some words to know how they are written but most words are directly readable from experience or plausible guess. For first graders who speak Hebrew it truly is pretty fun that you have to complete the words voiles (even though they're mostly written with nikud for first grade) because you can almost always guess them. I think the hebrew alphabet is pretty good even because most of the words in hebrew are much shorter because of the missing voiles- I think it's just an easy to write harder to read vs easy to read and harder to write problem- the hebrew alphabet has less letters and shorter words so it's easy to write in but harder to read in.
I may be biased as Hebrew is my native language but I still think it's one of the easiest and more compact alphabets.
I agree! The video does make the point that modern Hebrew doesn’t really need the ancient alphabet, but I think it just adds a beautiful link to the past
What alphabet? There's not Hebrew alphabet. Maybe an abjad.
Salam, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace.
Hebrew Alphabet Is Derived From Aramaic, Turned Into Squarer Shapes, Akin To Japanese Kanji And Korean Hangul, From Chinese, A Mere 1,500 Years Ago, At The Period Of Prophet Muhammad.
The Language Contains Arabic, Aramaic, Persian, Phoenician & Yiddish.
The Rabbi's Claim It Is The Oldest Language, But Why Is Arabic In Most Language's Instead Of Hebrew ?
@@omarlittle-hales8237
Shlomo? Peace? Maybe Shalom.
Hangul is designed from scratch. It's not like the Chinese language system. It's FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT.
@@zaco-km3su Salam, Shlomo [Aramaic], Shalom, Peace.
Who developed the Hangul system? The Hangul system was developed by Sejong, fourth king of the Chosŏn dynasty, in 1443 to improve literacy. In 1446 Hangul was made the official writing system of Korea. Despite this, Hanja (Chinese characters) persisted as the main writing system of the elite class for 500 more years.
😊 my favourite confusing word is דוד. Is it daveed (David)? Dood (water heater)? or dod (uncle)?
This video started out a bit funny but when he continued to run down the language it began to be a bit sad.
Every language has it's idiosyncrasies and knowing the history behind it would help in understanding it because that was how it evolved. There's no point complaining about it.
He mentioned Chinese but I wonder if he knows that it has a similar problem which is the exact opposite of Hebrew. The pronunciation can be confusing but when written down everything is perfectly clear.
I natively speak Aramaic. One of the major issues from my POV is that the niqqud system is too complicated because you're only supposed to use Waw/Vav and Yod/Yud for oo/oh and ee/eh sounds but Niqqud can replace them. I guess the bonus of that means that you don't need to rely on Waw/Vav and Yud but still, the extra flexibility makes it more complicated.
Another issue is that alot of Hebrew speakers are using letters that have lost their original meaning. Tet is not supposed to sound the same as Taw/Tav. Tsadi is not supposed to be a "ts" either, Kuf/Quf is not supposed to sound like Kaf, and Khet is not supposed to sound like modified Kaf. Every letter is supposed to represent its own unique sound. (in fact, Nikkud is actually supposed to called "niqqud") Just like with Aramaic though, the Hebrew alphabet also has a system of "softening" and "hardening" sounds like Bet becoming Vet.
Salam, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace.
Hebrew Alphabet Is Derived From Aramaic, Turned Into Squarer Shapes, Akin To Japanese Kanji And Korean Hangul, From Chinese, A Mere 1,500 Years Ago, At The Period Of Prophet Muhammad.
The Language Contains Arabic, Aramaic, Persian, Phoenician & Yiddish.
The Rabbi's Claim It Is The Oldest Language, But Why Is Arabic In Most Language's Instead Of Hebrew ?
There is Th sound in Ancient hebrew like in English but not in Arabic nobody use it but it better ti start sound Dalet without Dagesh like MoTHer faTHer real Tav without dagesh not from Ashkenuses THink or THanks Gimel without dagesh like Turkish hard G
Reply
@@СемёнСемёнычСемён Salam, Shlama, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace.
1. Mossad Was Behind 9/11.
2. Mossad Was Behind The Fall Of Saddam Hussein.
3. Mossad Was Behind The Fall Of Colonel Gaddafi.
4. Mossad Was Behind The Afghan War.
5. Mossad Was Behind The Syrian War.
6. Mossad Was Behind The Fall Of Lebanon.
7. Mossad Was Behind The Sudan Civil War.
Salam, Shlama, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace.
1. Mossad Was Behind 9/11.
2. Mossad Was Behind The Fall Of Saddam Hussein.
3. Mossad Was Behind The Fall Of Colonel Gaddafi.
4. Mossad Was Behind The Afghan War.
5. Mossad Was Behind The Syrian War.
6. Mossad Was Behind The Fall Of Lebanon.
7. Mossad Was Behind The Sudan Civil War.
@@СемёнСемёнычСемён Salam, Shlama, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace.
Th In Arabic = Tha
There Was No Ancient Hebrew, Just Aramaic And Arabic, Hebrew Is A Mere 1,500 Years Old.
Created To Separate Themselves From Aramaic And The Arabic Quran, At The Time Period Of Prophet Muhammad.
The Rabbi's Confirmed That He Was Prophet, And Always Went To Him For Advice And Counsel, But Said He Was From The Unwed Egyptian Concubine.
Whilst The Quran Confirms That Hagar Was A Egyptian Princess, Married To Abraham The Friend Of God.
Even The Word Muhammadim In Psalms Is Muhammad, But The Rabbi's Claim It Is Solomon's Lover.
Neither Abraham The Friend Of God Or King And Prophet Solomon, Can Have Unwed Relations As They Are Both Great Prophets Of God.
Also Missing In Torah, Is The Fact Solomon Was Both King And Prophet, Akin To His Father David.
Oh, and in Askenazi Ecclesiastical Pronounciation, not only Samech and Sin have the sound [s], but so does Tav without a Dagesh, which was [θ] in an older form.
It took me one month to learn both Hebrew alphabets (square and cursive) before I could start the first lesson in my Hebrew manual.
Whenever people tend to forget the traditional things, considers them obsolete and explore a 'modern' alternative to replace the original thing, then, the whole thing becomes complex and confusing. The same thing happens to language as well and I feel it is the case here too. Thank you very much indeed for showing us this amazing world of 'language and letters'...
There were actually several attempts at Hebrew romanization. The problem is that's when you discover the same letter two-sounds cases are actually required for the root system to function😀.
Do it like maltese?
Huh, they just put a line below the letter to show it doesn't have the dot. Nothing hard, nor fancy.
Thanks for this video. I'm not Israeli, nor am I Jewish, nor am I a Hebrew learner, but I always thought about how the sound merges, pronunciation changes, and overall lack of non-niqqud written vowel consistency really doesn't do Hebrew any favors.
Is the orthography of Ivrit identical to Biblical Hebrew? It kind of reminds me of modern Greek, which keeps some of the spelling of Ancient Greek, despite so many vowels being just /i/ now. Is the reason why some letters have the same sound value that they used to be emphatic, but given Ashkenazim were the majority of immigrants to Israel, a more "Europeanised" pronunciation prevailed as those emphatic sounds aren't found in any European language?
I think so. There are some changes, such as some words adding matres lectionis to the words to give a hint as to what vowel is in the word, but overall Modern and Biblical Hebrew are similar in orthography. I'd say that Modern Standard Israeli Hebrew is a mix between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Hebrew, with Sephardi Hebrew influencing the vowels more and Ashkenazi Hebrew influencing the consonants more, aside from final Tav, although Eliezer Ben-Yehudah wanted it to be based on entirely Sephardi pronunciation, reality had other plans, and yes many of the new Hebrew speakers had European Ashkenazi accents
In fact, since the establishment of the State of Israel for a long period of time (I do not have accurate information about the origin of the Jewish population today) it had a majority
of Jews of Spanish and Mizrahi ("Eastern") origin. The pronunciation of Jews whose mother tongue was Ladino is very different from that of those whose mother tongue was Arabic. Jews of Ashkenazi origin who lived in Israel for generations also spoke with an "oriental" accent. I remember older Ashkenazi Jews from Tsfat, for example, who spoke Yiddish with an Arabic ("eastern") accent...
someone probably already said it, the script english uses isnt bad, its the spelling, great video 10/10 :)
Ladino/Judeo-Spanish takes that wonderful alphabet-jad and applies it to Spanish.....or Old Castellan, and also has a huge Turkish vocabulary. So imagine that nonsense.
"El", a very common word indeed, is spelled aleph-yod-lamed, because yod can be e. Silent aleph everywhere.
To @ajrollo1437
Are not a great many speakers of Ladino simply using the Latin alphabet nowadays?
@@RCSVirginia Yes, when Turkey switched to the Latin alphabet in the 1920's or whenever it was, the Ladino community in Turkey also switched to Latin. As it was the largest community and had a bigger output of published material, that became the de-facto standard.
But the Rashi script was still used for ~500 years, and there is more extant material in that script than in Latin!
@@ajrollo1437
As Ladino is derived from medieval Spanish--in fact, one can get the gist of it by simply knowing a little Spanish--it makes sense to use a Latin script for it. Semitic languages are not ones that I speak, but I have read that they are better suited for abjads due to the structure of their words than Aryan languages are. That may or may not be true. Turks have told me that the Arabic abjad was not well suited for Turkish and that the change in the writing system was a major improvement. On the other hand, some have told me that the old Court Osmanli was a beautiful tongue and that its calligraphy was gorgeous. So, I guess that there is always a loss and a gain. It does seem to me that it would be a good idea for Ladino organizations to translate documents in the old Rashi writing into Latin letters to give modern people better access to them.
As a teacher of Hebrew myself, I was smiling the entire time. One day, I must play your video to my students so that they know, they are not alone in their frustrations🙂
Btw.: Some people like to joke that Hebrew is more a Slavic language than a Semitic one😀
To anybody wondering, why things are the way they are in Hebrew, I highly recommend getting at least some basic course in Arabic. Many things start to make sense after that, because Arabic still maintains many of the rules that were dropped in pronounciation of Hebrew.
Fun video, especially for somebody who knows English or Russian (that are both very hard to spell correctly)
I've started learning Hebrew at around age of 16... One of the biggest things that helped me understand the writing is a small book about grammar that talked about משקל concept and how actually the words are built. And at this point it all start make sense. Because you start understanding that you don't really care about ניקוד - it is all well implied by משקל... And the language very-very well structured around Semic roots so once I figured this out it all become way more clear.
Actually I find that once you think roots - it all become so much clear and simpler in both writing and reading. BTW I like that there is cursive in Hebrew. It exists in Russian (and cursive in Russian is אויי ואיי to read) and used to be in English till it was phased out.
Yet your examples are funny. BTW your forgot one more "et": עֵט, עֵת, אֶת
Как ты пишешь с огласовками? На твоей клавиатуре они есть?
@@Сусек
quite easily - I use Linux with lyx layout. And it is easy to remember for example קמץ on ק and חולם at ו - so when I press shift - instead of capital letter it types ניקוד.
on windows 10 there should be a new layout for new standard quite similar to lyx - but not sure how to enable one (not using windows for a long time)
שָלוֹם
I agree partially with your conclusion, but I think that there are some answers to why it is this way.
1) as a language that would originally have been carved (which is why it's written from right to left) it makes sense that it is an abjad.
2) because Hebrew is based on roots, Shlomo probably has at its base the idea that He is peace/whole, which might be lost with the extra vav's.
3) with the dispersion of the Jewish people, certain pronunciations were lost as the language that they predominantly spoke didn't have that sound. One example is the thaf, which was pronounced as an 's' in the Ashkenazi areas and a 't' in the Sephardi areas. This is why we have Shabbat and Shabbas. People have to some extent kept these mispronunciations because it's easier than to try and learn "Yemenite" pronunciation, in which all of the letters actually sound different, which would also correct the problem of misspelling.
4) the fact that Hebrew came back as a spoken language at a time when we write, so extra letters are not difficult to produce, but they will aid in pronunciation and understanding, this vav, yud and aleph are all used as vowel markers.
5) the fact that many people needed to learn Hebrew quickly, often under difficult circumstances, so there wasn't the will to make things internally consistent.
this is how we, not native speakers, feel about english
07:55 - A few corrections:
The letters ט & ת are not actually the same. Listen to the way the yemenites pronounce them. And same goes for ק, which is *not* like כ - and, in fact, ק should be transcripted as a Q.
I completely agree with You, that the Beautiful _Niqqudh_ should be *an integral part* of the written Hebrew Language, *ALWAYS.* And most especially so when it comes to the dots _within_ a letter = the _Daghesh_ and the _Mapiq_ = the dot inside a ה, which deserve *a **_special_** respect:* it *is,* after all, *the LAST and ONLY surviving remnant, of a Case System in Hebrew.* 🙂
At the ancient age I am- and trying to learn this language just to keep my noggin going- I thought all these years of struggle "It's just me"- you have articulated otherwise. Thanks!
As someone who tries occasionally to learn biblical Hebrew, what I find most frustrating is how similar in visual some of the letters are.
You'll get used to that. The good thing is that all of the problems discussed in this video do not apply to Biblical Hebrew. The pronunciation differences are still in tact, and niqqud are regularly written. Everything about the alphabet made sense in ancient times, it got fucked up during its revitalization.
@@suranumitu7734What you are saying is true, and I very much agree with your statements, but why is your profile picture of Alleister Crowley?
@@BSBYLYHWH If you look closely, you'll see that it's not actually Aleister Crowley, but grumpy cat.
No wonder I can't spell in Hebrew even though I try.
@@antoniacanaris6866dont worry many isreali cant
When you mentioned uncle Shlomo, I thought you would talk about uncle David which is very very confusing in Hebrew: דוד דוד
Great video, I found it very interesting. I'm always fascinated by languages, and the complaints that people seem to be constantly making about their own.
I was born in the US, and learned Persian from my parents, which uses the Arabic script. I definitely agree that having a different shape depending on where in the word you are is an interesting quirk (once you actually remember all of them), and I'm very grateful that Persian doesn't have nearly as many spelling inconsistencies as you've pointed out in Hebrew. But definitely, one hundred percent, the thing that makes me the angriest is the vowel diacritics. I can speak fairly well about the things that don't require very technical words, but when it comes to reading, I have to slow down on each individual word and run through every possible vowel combination until I find one that I recognize. And for writing, I'm probably less proficient than a primary schooler: we don't have many spelling inconsistencies, but the few rules about inconsistency that exist are fairly common.
Persian has similar problems as Hebrew. For example, two types of T in Arabic are pronounced the same in Persian. I know all these "duplicated" letters only exist in loan words from Arabic, but Persian has a lot of them (as many as 40%). Persian would probably be better written with a Latin or Cyrillic alphabet (like in Tajikistan)
@@tFighterPilot two Ts, three Ss, four Zs, plus the whole U/V and I/Y dilemma, yeah. No comment as to whether or not it would be better off with latin or cyrillic, but personally I like keeping the arabic script, purely for the sake of calligraphy and artistic purposes.
Amazing vid. Feels so good to hear all these frustrations vented out. I've been learning a bit of hebrew and yeah I'm already getting used to the bs.
So many inconsistencies in english and portuguese too, my native language
I don't want to tell people how to write in their native language as someone who is neither Jewish nor a Hebrew speaker, but I think having Nikkud on all words would be a good idea. Especially since I find the Nikkud to not only make it easier to read but also adds beauty to the script. It's just so nice.
Once you learn them it’s fascinating how quickly you can do without them. That said, I will note that without question, Israelis and the government regularly use diacritics/nikkud when writing out new or uncommon words. Also, you get pretty good a guessing what is likely to follow since Hebrew is a largely standardized language with emphasis on 2nd or 3rd syllables and consistency with plurals and reflexive sounds. You can learn how to say one word and then apply that to many others and usually be right
Nah man, since you're an English speaker I don't think you get it. I speak Urdu for which the writing system is like Arabic, no vowels written. Since I'm fluent in it, I just read it with problems, but a non native cannot read it. I also speak Japanese, when I was younger I always thought the characters are stupid and the "furigana" or how to read the characters should be present next to all the kanji, until I actually learnt them and now don't care about furigana. Heck, Japanese doesn't even use spaces.
It's like telling an English speaker to stop using the weird and historical spellings and just write the words the way they are pronounced. Suddenly doesn't work does it?
@@amj.composer I see what you saying, and I don't disagree with a majority of your post. the problem is your last line. It's not like adding Nikkud would be up and redoing the full spelling system, only keeping the training wheels. Getting rid of the weird and historical spelling of English would not only require a full spelling reform, it would also require everyone to relearn how to read and write (there are a ton of great videos that explain this better than I). That is comparing apples to dynamite. Both are objects, but one would be an inconvenience and a preference, whereas the other could blow up in your face. I would love it If English used the Diacritics that were used to teach me how to read because I have an extremely hard time with reading and writing because of dyslexia. This is my fault for not adding context to my post and just writing out my original comment when I wasn't fully awake. It would be really nice if more books offered reading aids to those who would like to read the text but also offered help for those who have issues with reading. Again not your fault I screwed up with my original comment or anyone's fault I'm slow as hell to think.
@@Avatarfan10000 Oh no, not your fault at all, and I actually definitely agree with you since you have provided context. On a slightly similar but maybe perhaps unrelated note with Urdu, I WISH more at least beginner to intermediate books had the pronunciation marks. Would've helped my Urdu journey immensely. (Context: Native Hindi Speaker who learnt Urdu by self-study and reading Novels/Poetry)
The reasons for this cofusion stems from Hebrew letters being Assyrian, and Jews losing the pronounciation of their own language from living in Europe for 2000 years. In Assyrian we use the exact same letters the same way, and even spell in a similar manner, but each letter has its own sound, and spelling makes a lot more sense. The main reason for Jews not to update spelling for modern Hebrew would be that it confuses root words, since Semitic languages use a lot of conjugations of one root word
I'm a Hebrew speaker here, I laughed out loud, I definitely agree, by the way you forgot to mention the stolen "petah" phenomenon, words like an apple that you only write "tapuh" but actually say "tapuah" as if where is the "a"
By the way, I think that's why I often encounter people who write with errors, even if they are native speakers
And a little something added the letter "כ" is actually خ
And the letter "ח" is actually ح
same for "ת ט"
that they are ت ط
Indeed most people do not pronounce
Yeah that's a tendency for Hebrew speakers to favor "a" sound around glottic consonants
As an Israeli, native hebrew speaker, I am biased, Iget it. Everything you mentioned in your video is correct, but still I love the hebrew language, it's logic, it's layers of history. And I wouldn't change it. There has been some suggestions (not too serious ones) to change the Hebrew alphabet to Latin script. I am against it: the whole logic of the language ( mainly the roots system which is quite genial) would get lost this way. בקיצור, לא מצחיק ותניח לעברית שלנו בשקט Let our Hebrew be!
This was my exact experience trying to learn Arabic. Sometimes, expecially in the first year of learning, I just wanted to quit trying to learn how to read and just use the Ge'ez script because abugidas are a work of art and deserve to be praised. Unfortunately, the Ge'ez script doesn't have the ð or θ sounds, so it wouldn't be a good writing system replacement for Arabic.
I eventually got used to the Arabic writing system, but the lack of diacritics still throws me off. I'm also still not the best at distinguishing diacritics from long vowels, so I absolutely suck at spelling. It's a work in progress, but hopefully I'll get there soon.
I'm a native Hebrew and Yiddish speaker learning Arabic .
I recently started reading Judeo-Arabic as it is the only way for me to read classic Arabic at a reasonable pace I .
Salam, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace.
Hebrew Alphabet Is Derived From Aramaic, Turned Into Squarer Shapes, Akin To Japanese Kanji And Korean Hangul, From Chinese, A Mere 1,500 Years Ago, At The Period Of Prophet Muhammad.
The Language Contains Arabic, Aramaic, Persian, Phoenician & Yiddish.
The Rabbi's Claim It Is The Oldest Language, But Why Is Arabic In Most Language's Instead Of Hebrew ?
I'm Brazilian. And in Portuguese, we have a lot of bad decisions when it comes to representing the sound of a word. For example, the "s" sound (like in the s of "sound" or "seek") may be represented by "ss", "ç", "c" or "s." It's awful. Even I, a native speaker, have a hard time knowing how to write some words because of it. I even had to buy a Portuguese Course to learn stuff like this. I'M A NATIVE SPEAKER. I am supposed to master my own language. But Portuguese is easier than Hebrew, I guess.
as a native speaker of both hebrew and brazilian portuguese, i can assure you that portuguese orthography is much easier. besides /s/ (s/c/sc/x/xc/ç) and /ʃ/ (x/ch) i think it's pretty straight forward
The 2nd script of the Modern Hebrew alphabet isn't called Cursive Hebrew, it's called (at least in Hebrew) Handwritten script (ktiv) - the name isn't 1-to-1 translatable to English. That is the script people write with almost exclusively. The other, boxy script, called Print, is used in print and is taught to kids. It's analagous to how spoken language is different than formal language. The Nikkud (diacritics) remain the same, however. Cursive writing *does* exist, and only for Handwriting script - you could connect up Print script letters but that's stylistic, so it'd just be a font.
Hello, native Hebrew speaker here. This video is hilarious, but it's not a real problem pretty much ever (for natives) you want something real to rant about? Try explaining the Hebrew Nikud (ניקוד) that all Israeli kids have to learn in high school. There are a billion different Nikud symbols (and many represent the same vowel), each symbol is not interchangable, there are a billion rules that you have to learn before you can spell with the Nikud correctly, to learn Nikud you have to go through the entire hebrew grammer such as verbs, binyanim (בניינים), gzarot (גזרות), and so much more! Every student in Israel has to study of this and has to know perfectly how to use Nikud correctly and the worst part is that it's completely useless because no one over the age of 10 even uses the tiny symbols!!! Also we all forget these rules 10 minutes after we finish the Hebrew finals
Congrats..you got a subscriber..I came across your Uralic video (naganan or however it's written). But I checked out what else you have to offer...and man, as an oleh who had to learn Hebrew, you have it nailed...Perfect.
1:00 Hangul isn't that great anymore, actually. Korean phonology has changed somewhat since its invention 550 years ago, so the letters don't quite correspond to pronunciation anymore. For example, there's six consonant letters that are all pronounced /t/ at the end of a syllable, and the pronunciation ofㅔandㅐhas also merged.
I think that Cyrillic as used to write more or less any language other than Russian corresponds the best to spoken language.
Salam, Shlomo, Shalom, Peace.
Hebrew Alphabet Is Derived From Aramaic, Turned Into Squarer Shapes, Akin To Japanese Kanji And Korean Hangul, From Chinese, A Mere 1,500 Years Ago, At The Period Of Prophet Muhammad.
The Language Contains Arabic, Aramaic, Persian, Phoenician & Yiddish.
The Rabbi's Claim It Is The Oldest Language, But Why Is Arabic In Most Language's Instead Of Hebrew ?
The harder and more complicated the language is, the cooler and more interesting it is.👍🏽
3:20
Dude, ALL Abjads are "impure Abjads". The term "Abjad" was taken from "impure Abjad" scripts.
Proto-Sinaic and later Paleo-Hebrew/Phoenician (basically the same) Abjads ARE the first Abjads and they have vowel letters. Hebrew is the closest living language to the hypothetical script of "pure Abjad".
If anything is flawed in here is the meaning of the term "Abjad".
Great video; really funny.
I'm guessing that Hebrew, like Arabic, once had hard and soft varieties of s, t and d, but that because Hebrew was revived by speakers of languages like Russian, Polish, German and Yiddish, which lack those distinctions, the pronunciations coalesced?
Some speakers still pronounce them in the original way
As a native Hebrew speaker, I can say that I Too suffer #גם אני סובל. BTW, we use Nikud in language lesson (Lashon-לשון), which is very annoying.
As someone who learned Hebrew as a kid and remembers endless worksheets of having to pick either aleph/ayin, kof/khof, bet/vet/vav to spell a word correctly, part of the reason that there are several letters for the "same sound" is that there are closely-related sounds that Hebrew lost over time. For example, Arabic has 3 letters for 3 kinds of /t/ sounds: /t/, /t'/ the back of the throat one) and /th/ (which isn't exactly a /t/ but close enough). Hebrew had those sounds too, which is why there's tet, tof and tof dagesh. (The /'t'/ sound seems to have turned into tsadi in Hebrew, so maybe there might overwise have been 4 letters for more or less the same sound!) But Hebrew lost those alternate sounds, while Arabic kept them, so the Arabic writing system seems more logical just because those sounds are still the same.
English most definitely has this problem with vowel combinations, as does French, but Thai is the famous one for having multiple letters for sounds that the modern language has lost (many were borrowed from Pali and Sanskrit originally-- there are excellent videos floating around about it), making learning to read and write a nightmare for most everyone.
Amazing, they managed to recreate kanji using only an alphabet.
Hebrew hurts so much, i have been trying for months but without vowels it takes me minutes to decipher words
You could practice it via me, if u so wish.
One of the names that annoyed me as a kid was "גיא" (pronounced Guy)... Where's the א??? Where did it go?
How are we supposed to put two vowels on the G sound??? The language literally doesn't support that... Is the i sound attached to the י? But than י wouls become a constanant and there would be a stop in the middle of the name and it sound something more like Guyi, which it doesn't, it's literally just Guy...
Man I haven't thought about it for 13 years
eh, I do my part by using the correct ע sound whenever I can
Now that's cool! If you're an Israeli Jew, then it makes it even cooler
@@janboreczek3045 it's fun, gives many word a taste.
I do that with ח as well
As a native Arabic speaker, this entire mess could've been avoided if the pronunciation of the revived language was kept the same as other semetic languages instead of being influenced by European pronunciation.
Half the letters that have multiple pronunciations originally had one sound that ceased to exist, ק≠כ, ט≠ת, ח≠כ, ש≠ס≠צ and so on.
When I'm learning Hebrew i just pronounce them the "semetic" way just to make my learning easier, then I add a foreign European accent to sound the "correct" way.
Exactly. What is off-putting about modern Hebrew is that it has a European softness to it, instead of the strong pronunciation of the ancient Hebrew language. Hebrew as spoken by the Israelites would've sounded similar to Aramaic and Arabic today, but since it was revived primarily by Ashkenazi Jews, who spoke European mother tongues before re-creating Israel, it comes across as soft and even a bit lispy. They indeed should've kept the original Semitic sound in the reconstruction of modern Hebrew. This whole debacle with the writing system is also unsurprising because of this.
The Jewish pronunciation today is according to the Iberian peninsula pronunciation, not the European
@@ghostq8625 Iberia is in Europe..
@@AfroAsiaticLanguages 😂 not really there is Berber (marocan) influence
This is literally the best explanation of the Hebrew letters I've ever seen. Thank you, and bless you for doing this. Also, thank you for making it funny!
אוקיי, אני מרגיש שאני התגובה היחידה בעברית כאן, בקיצר, אתה הסברת כאן את הנושא בצורה מצחיקה יחסית אבל האלפבית הזה הוא לא כלכך סיוט בשביל דוברי עברית כשפת אם (לפחות מהנסיון שלי עם סביבתי)
צודק במאה אחוז - כשאתה לומד את זה מגיל אפס אז בטח שזה לא בעיה. אני פשוט אוהב להתלונן על דברים שאני לא רואה בהם הגיון, ובהשוואה להמון שפות אחרות שלמדתי, אצל עברית ההגיון הוא די.. רופף.
@@imshawngetoffmylawn נכון מאוד (חחח)
כמי שעברית היא שפת האם שלה אני מרגישה לגמרי בנוח עם שיטת הכתיבה שלה. כשאני למדתי קרוא וכתוב (מזמן...) עדיין הרבה אנשים דיברו במבטא "נכון".
האחדת הכיתוב בהתאמה למבטא של ה"עברית המודרנית" (כפי שמבטאים רוב ילידי ישראל) יגרום לאיבוד המשמעות המקורית של המילים.
להתלונן על כך שיש אותיות "דפוס" ואותיות "כתב" עוד יותר מוזר. הרי זה קיים גם בשפות אחרות.
האותיות הסופיות הן הצורה המקורית של האות. כאשר כותבים בעט (בניגוד לחציבה בסלע למשל) צורתן משתנה בתחילת/אמצע המילה באופן "טבעי" עם תנועת היד הכותבת.
יש עוד שפות שנכתבות בשיטה דומה לעברית. למשל שפות ברבריות. גם הם מרוצים מהכתב שלהם וחושבים שהוא מתאים לשפה המדוברת.
גם לפני 2000 שנה ויותר היו בארץ ישראל מבטאים שונים שחלקם נחשבו לא נכונים. מי שדיבר במבטא כזה לא הורשה לקרוא בתורה בציבור (אלא אם כן הוכיח שיודע לבטא "נכון" את המילים).
שיטת הניקוד שנבחרה (מבין כמה שיטות שהתקיימו במקביל) היא הטבריינית שמתאימה להגייה הטבריינית שנחשבה לנכונה. הניקוד הומצא כאשר שפת הדיבור השתנתה ופחות אנשים דיברו עברית בחיי היומיום על מנת לשמר את ההגייה הנכונה של המילים ועל ידי כך את המשמעות המקורית.
להתלונן באנגלית שהיא שפה המורכבת מערבוביה של שפות הנכתבות בהתאם לכללים השונים של כל שפה ושהאיות שלהן נקבע עוד לפני שהתגבשה השפה האנגלית המודרנית, על שפה שהכתב שלה התקבע הרבה יותר מוקדם והתאים לשפה הסדורה כפי שנהגתה נראה לי תמוה. גם הדקדוק האנגלי לא בדיוק "סדור".
למי שמתקשה בכתיבה בעברית אני ממליצה לקרוא כמה שיותר. בסופו של דבר כולם לומדים לכתוב נכון
shakshuka!😆 There's another reason that I hate the lack of vowels. Sometimes the tense/binyan of verbs is distinguished only by the unwritten vowel sounds, making it impossible to tell which construction is meant, so while you can tell which verb is meant, you can't tell how/when the action took place.
9:47
I do want to clear that almost every single Israeli uses them and knows them. There are many villages and place names with them.
I most often see these letters on road signs for Arab towns.
@@Mfhollander2
Literally, the name of THE biggest city on the land - Gaza, starts with ע' غ.
@@AduckButSpainin Hebrew it starts with ע