Timeline for Why does the Hebrew alphabet not have letters representing vowels?
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14 events
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| Aug 21 at 15:08 | comment | added | Qwertrl | @AlBerko How is that relevant to your claim that translations are interpretations? Obviously, every translation that isn’t purely literalist can’t fully encompass the meaning of any text of any language. That’s not unique to Biblical Hebrew, and it doesn’t have anything to do with “interpretation”. For example, one who grew up bilingual can translate a text of one language into the other in a non-literalist manner. This isn’t because he “interpreted” one language in the context of the other; he understands each language in its own context. It’s because of the very nature of languages. | |
| Aug 21 at 8:20 | comment | added | Al Berko | @QwertyCTRL. What's your mother tongue? Did you ever try to translate the Torah? No two languages (not even one language in different times or places) have exactly the same meaning for words. Here are some examples: how do you translate אלוהים, what's the difference between רצח and הרג, is לא תגנוב about kidnapping or property, how rude and sexual is לשכב? You can't explain them in one word in any other language. Just check the differences between different classical translations of the Torah. | |
| Aug 21 at 1:22 | comment | added | Qwertrl | @AlBerko Precisely how is translation “interpretation”? Maybe a couple words, like the last three examples in your comment, but by far most words’ translations are not based on “guessing”. Rather, most translations are based on simple education from others to whom Hebrew was a second language, tracing back to the last generation of teachers to whom Hebrew was a first language. It’s also based on old translations made when Hebrew was still spoken, like Targum Onkelos and Yonatan and the Septuagint. There wasn’t some break between spoken Hebrew and today, when nobody knew any Hebrew. | |
| Aug 20 at 18:21 | comment | added | Al Berko | @QwertyCTRL. Yes, it does. As a second language, Hebrew words lose their original meaning and can only be understood in translation. Translation is always an interpretation. E.g. ברא can only be understood in application to God, because the only use in the scripture is in terms of "creation" as opposed to יצר to עשה. So we don't know how the word ברא was used in everyday language. Another example is fruits and vegs - we don't know what שום, אבטיח, מלפפון mean in the Torah, we can only guess. TBC... | |
| Aug 19 at 21:24 | comment | added | Qwertrl | @AlBerko That doesn’t logically follow. It “died” as a SPOKEN language, but it was used by Jews liturgically, during Torah study, and studied as a subject among many scholars throughout our history. We didn’t all forget the definitions of words when we stopped speaking it colloquially. For example, we know that שמן means oil the same way you know that “oil” means oil. Not through “interpretation” or anything like that. If anything, we began studying the language in an academic sense more in-depth than in the late pre-exilic era. | |
| Aug 19 at 7:47 | comment | added | Al Berko | @QwertyCTRL. When language is not spoken there are NO "plain definitions" - everything is perceived through the lens of interpretation, just like we decipher ancient languages but less scientifically. For example, Rashi famously interprets many words based on his imagination rather than "linguistic truthfulness", such as "כברת הארץ לבוא אפרתה" - "לְשׁוֹן כַּבִּיר, רִבּוּי, מַהֲלָךְ רַב", but Nahmanides who visited Israel shreds this interpretation: "וְעַכְשָׁו שֶׁזָּכִיתִי וּבָאתִי אֲנִי לִירוּשָׁלִַם, רָאִיתִי בְּעֵינַי שֶׁאֵין מִן קְבוּרַת רָחֵל לְבֵית לֶחֶם אֲפִלּוּ מִיל," | |
| Aug 18 at 1:37 | comment | added | Qwertrl | @AlBerko What do you mean by the statement, “ Hebrew stopped being a spoken language so it depended on interpretations rather than common meaning”? A language not having native speakers does not somehow eliminate all knowledge of its words’ plain definitions. | |
| Aug 17 at 19:51 | comment | added | Al Berko | @QwertyCTRL. It's not my lack of knowledge, it's everyone's. Since the 6th century BCE, Hebrew stopped being a spoken language so it depended on interpretations rather than common meaning. That opened a huge opportunity for very creative rendering including אל תקרא אלא. | |
| Aug 15 at 17:57 | comment | added | Qwertrl | @AlBerko Useless? Unreadable? That’s an insult against every Abjad that ever existed. And Jews, especially in Israel, have been comprehensively reading Hebrew without vowels millennia, and we’re doing just fine. Your lack of knowledge about how a word is pronounced does not mean it’s somehow “unreadable”. There are rules, and simply things you have to memorize, just like in English. The only reason why someone would think an alphabet is better than an abjad, is because of their lack of exposure to abjads. In fact, a non-phonetic alphabetical language is arguably “worse” than a phonetic abjad. | |
| May 20, 2019 at 16:39 | comment | added | Al Berko | אליה וקוץ בה - it can be interpreted in many ways, you're saying, so it may be misread in the same ways. Why did G-d write a script that is pretty much useless/unreadable? Did you notice that פרמשולש can be read as פרים שלשה or פר משולש. Keep in mind that the original scrolls didn't have spaces either. | |
| Nov 14, 2011 at 21:07 | vote | accept | Alex | ||
| Oct 2, 2011 at 1:47 | comment | added | Alex | @truthseeker, no reason you can't put in the vowel markings in such cases. (Even for native Hebrew words, this is sometimes done for disambiguation.) But we're talking here primarily about the Hebrew alphabet as it is used to write the Bible and other sacred writings; I guarantee you Ms. Merkel's name doesn't appear in them. (And after all, even fully alphabetic languages sometimes have the same problem too. Would you know how to pronounce "Recep Tayyip Erdogan" properly based on the spelling, if you don't know Turkish?) | |
| Oct 1, 2011 at 19:31 | comment | added | truthseeker | But what with foreign words like for example names of real people? How can a jew know how to pronounce name of people he never heard of? For example name of germany chancellor Angela Merkel would be written in hebrew as מרכל. Possible pronounciations are for example Markel, Markal, Marakal or even Marchal (because dagesh marks are commonly not used). There is quite large space for ambiguity. Such writing system seems very impractical for me. | |
| Sep 28, 2011 at 20:31 | history | answered | Alex | CC BY-SA 3.0 |