Hebrew Course Online – The Hebrew Alephbet

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Almost any Hebrew course online will spend time explaining the Hebrew alphabet, called the Alephbet (or Aleph Bet). All languages of course have their own alphabet and contain both consonants and vowels. In addition, most of the languages on earth are read from left to right.

But there are a number of languages, mostly of Arabic origin that read from the right to the left. Hebrew is also one of these languages. The Alephbet gets its name from the first two letters of the Jewish alphabet, Aleph, and Bet and has 22 letters – all consonants.

One may well ask how there can be an alphabet without any vowels. Well, as it turns out people who really know the language don’t need the vowels. Most text that is seen in Israel is written without vowels.

One way to look at this no-vowel-allowed alphabet is to think of how people communicate on Twitter. Twitter only allows up to 140 characters which often forces longer tweets to be, shall we say creative. So think of Hebrew as “ancient tweet” – so to speak. The ways that the consonants are put together in Hebrew allow little doubt as to the meaning for the experienced ...
... reader. This was how it was in the ancient times.

But as literacy declined in Israel around 600 AD, a group of Rabbis got together and decided to make things a bit easier and figured out a way to create vowel sounds. This bit of linguistic creativity was named “nikud”, and was a system of vowel marks placed above, below, and to the left of the consonant (no new vowels were added to the Aleph Bet). This “pointed text” was added to help beginners to better understand the language. However, as noted earlier this style is not used in mainstream Hebrew (It’s like tweet speak!)

And not only is it similar (sort of) to “tweet speak,” the orientation is right-to-left instead of left-to-right. This takes some getting used to for beginners.

According to Kabbalah (a mystical way of interpreting the Bible), Hebrew is written from right-to-left because the right side has greater spiritual revelation that the left (weaker) side. One has to remember that to many, Hebrew is considered to be a holy language.

Most of the Hebrew course online techniques will use the Aleph Bet in explaining how to read and write in Hebrew. Some courses however will try to avoid this subject by trying to explain Hebrew using the English alphabet in a way producing a hybrid language – much to the dismay of traditional Hebrew scholars.

Thank you very much for reading this article. If you are interested on Learning Hebrew and looking for the Online Hebrew Courses please take a look at our website for more information.