Of course, later Hebrew is not a true abjad (see Mater lectionis - Wikipedia ). In most cases, the absence of full glyphs for vowels makes the common root clearer, allowing readers to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from familiar roots (especially in conjunction with context clues) and improving word recognition while reading for practiced readers.” This is because words in Semitic languages are formed from a root consisting of (usually) three consonants, the vowels being used to indicate inflectional or derived forms. The abjad form of writing is well-adapted to the morphological structure of the Semitic languages it was developed to write. The major innovation of Greek was to dedicate these symbols exclusively and unambiguously to vowel sounds that could be combined arbitrarily with consonants In the 9th century BC the Greeks adapted the Phoenician script for use in their own language. The name abjad is based on the Arabic alphabet's first (in its original order) four letters-corresponding to a, b, j, and d Similar to other Semitic languages such as Phoenician, Hebrew and Semitic proto-alphabets: specifically, aleph, bet, gimel, dalet This contrasts with alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels “An abjad is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. The problem with using a simple mapping table for transliterating Hebew is that Hebrew is missing many vowels, unlike in Greek and its descendant alphabets (such as Latin and English).įor further elaboration, see Abjad - Wikipedia : One method of transliteration is using a simple mapping table, which I successfully did for Greek (see my previous post, cited above).
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