#semitic languages

rainaramsay:

antisemitism-eu:

tikkunolamorgtfo:

horusporus:

motleystitches:

solarcat:

shoshanah-ben-hohim:

witchofeindor:

In case y'all thought Hebrew was an easy language (Those tiny points around the letters appear only in children’s books btw)

those dots and dashes being the VOWELS, which only appear for children and language-learners

This seems like a good time to ask… why? Is there a reason why the vowels are omitted from most texts, given that there’s a system to indicate them? *curious*

Is this is unique to a certain language system? Tolkien’s made-up tengwar does a similar thing…

arabic does this too! i’ll let hebrew speakers explain theirs, but the explanation is simply that if you’re a fluent arabic speaker, the written forms and usage will provide the (non-textual) context that guides your pronunciation. what i mean by written forms for arabic is that every letter actually has a different morphology depending on their position in a word. kinda like… how… mm… the roman R in cursive changes forms depending on its position. tht helps a lot, i think. in any case, in regular practice, you do see the arabic vowel marks (depending on romanisation, is called harakah/harakat/harkat) appear regularly as a standard in quranic editions for non-arabic-using muslims. like, i grew up reading the ‘al-qur’an mashaf malaysia’ and thinking i was hot shit, and then i found my grandma’s pakistani one AND I DIED. lmao.

Semitic languages are like, reading: expert death mode.

The Hebrew vowels were only invented in the 8-9th century.  There were a few versions vying for dominance.  The Tiberias method won.

A Torah scroll is of course written with no vowels and no punctuation, as the traditional version was set long before these things were invented.

For the record, I have never once thought that Hebrew was an easy language.