of meditation based on visualizing the Hebrew letters.
Are you totally confused yet? What difference does adding a Dagesh make? In the Sephardic pronunciation that Israelis and most Hebrew speakers today use, adding a Dagesh almost never makes a difference in pronunciation. But in a few cases, when a Dagesh is placed within a letter (always a consonant), it changes the way you pronounce that consonant. When you add a Dagesh to the letter ו (Vet), for example, the V sound becomes a B sound, and you pronounce the letter like bet. When you pair a Dagesh with the letter ḥaf, the ḥ sound becomes a K sound, so the sound of that letter becomes kaf. Finally, the letter פ (Fey) with a Dagesh becomes a פּ (Peh).
Reading and writing from right to left
Hebrew, like other ancient Semitic languages (such as Acadian, Samarian, Ugaritic, and Arabic), is written from right to left. Why? Is there a preponderance of lefties in the region? No!
Maybe you’ve read the Bible, in particular the part where Moses comes down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments in hand. And if you haven’t read the Bible, perhaps you’ve seen the Mel Brooks film version in History of the World: Part 1. When Moses came down from the mountain, what was he holding? A copy of an email from the Almighty? A scroll of papyrus? No. He was holding two stone tablets! You may ask, “Well, how did the Ten Commandments get on the stone tablets? Did Moses have a special pen or something?”
When ancient Hebrew emerged, it was written by chiseling it in stone. If the writer was a rightie, they would have used their dominant hand — their right hand — to pound the mallet onto the stylus they held with their left hand. And because ancient Hebrew society (like all societies) favored righties, its language was written from right to left. The Phoenicians and then the Greeks followed suit. Then, for a while, the Greeks wrote in both directions, switching when they got to the end of the tablet or page. That practice makes sense, if you think about it; why press the Return key on your electric typewriter to go all the way back to start a new line when you can just keep going where you are in the backward direction! Then the Greeks decided that left to right would be their standard, but Hebrew scribes kept on writing right to left. Tradition! (OK, folks today are just as likely to have an electric typewriter as the ancient Greeks, but that's neither here nor there.)
https://www.easylearnhebrew.com, an online course in Hebrew. The site can help you read Hebrew in no time!
FUN&GAMES
Write the sound that each of the following Hebrew characters makes:
| בּ (B) _____ | ג (G) _____ | ל (L)____ | ב (V) _____ |
| ד (D) _____ | ה (H) _____ | ר (R)____ | א (° silent) _____ |
You can find the answers in Appendix C.
Chapter 2
The Nitty-Gritty: Basic Hebrew Grammar
IN THIS CHAPTER
By birth, Hebrew is part of the Semitic family, along with Arabic, Aramaic, and some other Middle Eastern languages. To this day, Hebrew is quite similar to other Semitic languages in terms of the way words — especially verbs — are formed. Hebrew nouns and verbs are marked for gender (feminine or masculine, no neuter), just like their Semitic cousins.
Today, Hebrew, like many world languages, is grappling with inclusivity of nonbinary gender identities and the ways that language can acknowledge and accommodate them. In Israel, nonbinary people often speaking in alternating gender conjugations and there is no “singular they” as “they” is gendered in Hebrew. In the Diaspora, the Nonbinary Hebrew project has proposed a way for Hebrew to accommodate nonbinary gender identities, though their proposal has not (yet?) caught on in Israel or worldwide. For a chart of nonbinary Hebrew grammar and systematics, check out the Nonbinary Hebrew Project at www.nonbinaryhebrew.com/grammar-systematics.
The people who revived Hebrew as a modern language in the 19th and 20th centuries spoke and thought mostly in Yiddish, Russian, German, and other European languages. Those languages became the “adoptive parents” of Hebrew today. You notice their influence most strongly in the pronunciation of modern Hebrew and in the word order within sentences (syntax).
Making Sense of Hebrew Syntax
The syntax (the arrangement of words to make sentences), or תַּחְבִּיר (tahch-beer), of a Hebrew sentence is quite different from that of English. In this section, I run you through the basics of word order — what syntax looks like in English and how Hebrew is different. I also cover how to say there is and there isn’t, because if you can use this simple sentence construction, you can say a lot. Just plug in the noun of your choice, and you’ll be speaking Hebrew!
Putting your sentences in order
When you read or hear Modern Hebrew sentences, you may think that they’re oddly constructed compared with sentences in English or any other European language. In English, so much depends on word order. Hebrew, on the other hand, is more flexible about word order. In Hebrew, for example, you could say either of the following:
מֶמְשָׁלָה חֲדָשָׁה קָמָה (mehm-shah-laḥ ah-dah-shah kah-mah; literally: A government new arises.)
קָמָה מֶמְשָׁלָה חֲדָשָׁה (kah-mah mehm-shah-laḥ hah-dah-shah; literally: Arises government new.)
Both phrases mean the same thing: A new government rises. The order of the words doesn’t affect the meaning.
Look at another example in English. “Mollie kissed Fred” isn’t the same as “Fred kissed Mollie,” is it? It certainly isn’t to Mollie — or, for that matter, to Fred.
In Hebrew, sometimes a verb, especially one without an object, comes before its subject — not after it, as in English. Under certain conditions, you can identify the direct object (the person or thing acted on, as opposed to person or thing doing the acting) because