Hebrew 101: Lesson 2

More on Letters - A Real Challenge!

Let's continue learning letters. We're going to see a couple of interesting letters right now.

Hey, wait a minute! Don't those first two letters look exactly the same? And we've got one "S" already (the letter Samekh), don't we?

Okay, we'll figure it out in a moment.

The letters ש (Shin) and שׂ (Sin) are for sounds SH and S, respectively. They look exactly alike when written without diacritics. They are considered the same letter of the alphabet too. There are very few (if at all) words in Hebrew where Shin and Sin can be confused; perhaps thousands of years ago those two were variations of the same phoneme, who knows...

Letter Samekh and letter Sin stand for the same S-sound. A sort of historical oddity—שׂ stands for two letters, while two letters stand for the S-sound. Not too complicated—rather cumbersome—but definitely not rocket science.

Ok, so here is a simplified picture:

• remember, there are ש and ס for Sh and S, respectively.
• there is also a strange letter שׂ which looks like SH, but is pronounced like S.

Also, Sin is used much more rarely than Shin, although it's used in a number of very commonly used words, like ישראל (Israel). Anyway, this rarely becomes the main problem for Hebrew students.

If you're still with me, let's move on.

ה (hey) is practically the same as English h.

The letter Khet (ח) used to have specific guttural flavor; Jews from Arab countries still have this pronunciation sometimes. This pronunciation is somewhat close to ה, just "deeper"; which is probably why ה and ח look so much alike.

Most Israelis, though, pronounce it like ch in chutzpah (like German "ch").

The two above letters look alike; don't confuse them!

And now, some vocalization marks.

A "longer" version of the same vowels is marked with both vocalization mark and additional letter.

Now, those vowels (EE and OO) are only theoretically "longer" -- i.e., those used to be short and long vowels thousands of years ago. Today, short and long vowels are practically lost in Hebrew (that's unlike English). Israeli will consider vowels OO (as in moon) and U (as in put) to be exactly the same sound.

Ok, so it's not trivial, but let's make long story shorter. Memorize the letters and the vowels -- and forget the small historical details. :)

Words: Roots and Patterns

Semitic languages, Hebrew in particular, have a unique feature: application of consonant roots to word patterns (mishqalim in Hebrew). It's the most powerful tool in Hebrew morphology (i.e., word building). You take a root, like K-T-V (meaning: write/writing), combine it with different patterns, and that's how you get words like "writing", "book", "to write", "to dictate", "reporter", etc.

As you can imagine, this is a very powerful tool for the Hebrew student. Patterns by themselves usually carry some meaning too; knowledge of roots and patterns can give you a hint for understanding a word, even if this is the first time you've read it.

Root (שֹׁרֶשׁ)

Most often, a root consists of three consonant letters. Sometimes there are four, rarely two. Five letter roots can be found in borrowed words, and frankly speaking, I can only remember one word like this from the top of my head (see examples below). I've never heard of any roots with over 5 consonants.

Some examples, if you please:

3-letter roots:

4-letter roots:

4-letter roots are seen most often in either borrowed words or so-called "square" ones:

Example of 5-letter root:

As I said before, this is probably the only example I could recall:

Patterns (מִשְׁקָלִים)

Patterns are what make the dumb-looking root into living beast. The pattern gives a "general meaning" the spirit of something specific, turning abstract idea into a well-defined word.

A root is "applied" to the pattern. A pattern is a sort of almost-word, with some empty placeholders where root letters will take place.

Let's take a look on the following example, building words with different roots out of the pattern [_]ָ[_]וּ[_]

It's very simple, isn't it? This is what Hebrew words consist of, at least in theory. In practice, it's a bit more sophisticated, but not too much. I have to mention, that word structure is a primary topic for every Hebrew student.

New Words

Let's memorize some more words. At this point, I would suggest simply memorizing the words—what we can learn is still limited by our incomplete knowledge of the Hebrew alphabet. Once we learn it all and add some morphology rules, we'll start analyzing the words rather than blindly memorizing them.