![]() even states that ".most of the reading and writing that goes on in the world today can be traced back to the Hebrews' experiment with vowels." □The Hebrew Alphabet and the Power of the Vowels In his wonderful book In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, Joel Hoffman Ph.D. The Hebrew alphabet is among the oldest in the world, and it was either derived of, or equal to the original Phoenician alphabet (even the word alphabet comes from the first two Hebrew letters: aleph and beth). Before the alphabet, words or phrases were represented wholly, as little pictures, and the idea that all the many words consisted of a minute group of smaller 'atoms' was brilliant. The formation of the proto- Canaanite alphabet (around Abraham's time the 19th century BC) was an incredible leap in understanding language. Some letters have a different, longer (final) form when they occur at the end of a word. All letters of the Hebrew alphabet alternate with some others during the history of the language, but as we look at the meaning of personal names in the Bible, we usually don't see more than waws turning into yods and vice versa, or hes and alephs do the same, and occasionally shins and sameks. ![]() All Hebrew letters have names and identities, and in post-Biblical times were even rendered numerical value. The Hebrew alphabet is not simply a collection of abstract linguistic elements, like the English alphabet is. The Meaning of the Hebrew Alphabet - And a Survey per Hebrew Letter.
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