The Hebrew alphabet, known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is traditionally an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. In modern Hebrew, vowels are increasingly introduced. It is also used informally in Israel to write Levantine Arabic, especially among Druze. It is an offshoot of the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, which flourished during the Achaemenid Empire and which itself derives from the Phoenician alphabet.
A mater lectionis is any consonant that is used to indicate a vowel, primarily in the writing of Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac. The letters that do this in Hebrew are aleph א, he ה, waw ו and yod י, with the latter two in particular being more often vowels than they are consonants. In Arabic, the matres lectionis are ʾalif ا, wāw و and yāʾ ي.
The mappiq is a diacritic used in the Hebrew alphabet. It is part of the Masoretes' system of niqqud, and was added to Hebrew orthography at the same time. It takes the form of a dot in the middle of a letter. An identical point with a different phonetic function is called a dagesh.
The dagesh is a diacritic that is used in the Hebrew alphabet. It takes the form of a dot placed inside a consonant. A dagesh can either indicate a "hard" plosive version of the consonant or that the consonant is geminated, although the latter is rarely used in Modern Hebrew.
In Hebrew orthography, niqqud or nikud is a system of diacritical signs used to represent vowels or distinguish between alternative pronunciations of letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Several such diacritical systems were developed in the Early Middle Ages. The most widespread system, and the only one still used to a significant degree today, was created by the Masoretes of Tiberias in the second half of the first millennium AD in the Land of Israel. Text written with niqqud is called ktiv menuqad.
The Tiberian vocalization, Tiberian pointing, or Tiberian niqqud is a system of diacritics (niqqud) devised by the Masoretes of Tiberias to add to the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible to produce the Masoretic Text. The system soon became used to vocalize other Hebrew texts as well.
Waw is the sixth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician wāw 𐤅, Aramaic waw 𐡅, Hebrew vavו, Syriac waw ܘ and Arabic wāw و.
The Hebrew language uses the Hebrew alphabet with optional vowel diacritics. The romanization of Hebrew is the use of the Latin alphabet to transliterate Hebrew words.
Bet, Beth, Beh, or Vet is the second letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician bēt 𐤁, Hebrew bētב, Aramaic bēṯ 𐡁, Syriac bēṯ ܒ, and Arabic bāʾ ب. Its sound value is the voiced bilabial stop ⟨b⟩ or the voiced labiodental fricative ⟨v⟩.
Holam or cholam is a Hebrew niqqud vowel sign represented by a dot above the upper left corner of the consonant letter. For example, here the holam appears after the letter mem⟨מ⟩: מֹ. In modern Hebrew, it indicates the mid back rounded vowel,, and is transliterated as an o.
Hiriq, also called Chirik is a Hebrew niqqud vowel sign represented by a single dot ⟨ ִ ⟩ underneath the letter. In Modern Hebrew, it indicates the phoneme which is similar to the "ee" sound in the English word deep and is transliterated with "i". In Yiddish, it indicates the phoneme which is the same as the "i" sound in the English word skip and is transliterated with "i".
Kamatz or qamatz is a Hebrew niqqud (vowel) sign represented by two perpendicular lines ⟨ ָ ⟩ underneath a letter. In modern Hebrew, it usually indicates the phoneme which is the "a" sound in the word spa and is transliterated as a. In these cases, its sound is identical to the sound of pataḥ in modern Hebrew. In a minority of cases it indicates the phoneme, equal to the sound of ḥolam. In traditional Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation, qamatz is pronounced as the phoneme, which becomes in some contexts in southern Ashkenazi dialects.
Ktiv hasar niqqud, colloquially known as ktiv maleh, are the rules for writing Hebrew without vowel points (niqqud), often replacing them with matres lectionis. To avoid confusion, consonantal ו and י are doubled in the middle of words. In general use, niqqud are seldom used, except in specialized texts such as dictionaries, poetry, or texts for children or for new immigrants.
Tzere is a Hebrew niqqud vowel sign represented by two horizontally-aligned dots "◌ֵ" underneath a letter. In modern Hebrew, tzere is pronounced the same as segol and indicates the phoneme /e/, which is the same as the "e" sound in the vowel segol and is transliterated as an "e". There was a distinction in Tiberian Hebrew between segol and Tzere.
Kubutz or qubbutz and shuruk are two Hebrew niqqud vowel signs that represent the sound. In an alternative, Ashkenazi naming, the kubutz is called "shuruk" and shuruk is called "melopum".
The Hebraization of English is the use of the Hebrew alphabet to write English. Because Hebrew uses an abjad, it can render English words in multiple ways. There are many uses for hebraization, which serve as a useful tool for Israeli learners of English by indicating the pronunciation of unfamiliar letters. An example would be the English name spelled "Timothy", which can be Hebraized as "טימותי" in the Hebrew alphabet.
Hebrew orthography includes three types of diacritics:
Begadkefat is the phenomenon of lenition affecting the non-emphatic stop consonants of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic when they are preceded by a vowel and not geminated. The name is also given to similar cases of spirantization of post-vocalic plosives in other languages; for instance, in the Berber language of Djerba. Celtic languages have a similar system.
Biblical Hebrew orthography refers to the various systems which have been used to write the Biblical Hebrew language. Biblical Hebrew has been written in a number of different writing systems over time, and in those systems its spelling and punctuation have also undergone changes.
In orthography, a plene scriptum is a word containing an additional letter, usually one which is superfluous – not normally written in that word – nor needed for the proper comprehension of the word. Today, the term applies mostly to sacred scripture.
