Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

Hi all,

the study of the origins of the Hebrew alphabet may give some insight into
why some intuitively feel that Hebrew (or proto-Hebrew) was originally a CV
language.

Early attempts at defining an alphabet were largely logographic. That is to
say that pictures represent concepts. From a linguistic point of view I
would say that such alphabets have a number of advantages. As concepts are
represented by pictures they have a certain interlingual quality which is
desirable.

Later on people felt the need to implement a more general system of writing.
It is easy to see why. There are just far too many concepts to learn and
this makes defining and learning a universally accepted logographic alphabet
challenging. Phonetic alphabets are much more generic in their quality,
easier to learn, and have a wider application in reuse given that the set of
unique sounds in a language is much smaller than the set of concepts it can
express.

To this very end the ancient Egyptian logographic alphabet was adapted and
implemented as a phonetic alphabet. When we get into phonetics we get into a
really messy business. We start opening up cans of worms about what the
fundamental units of speech are. We start asking questions like "What is the
smallest perceivable sound?" i.e. what is the set of natural phones of any
given language. This is an open and fertile field of research even today.
However, our modern perception tends to universally agree that we can divide
sounds into consonant sounds and vowel sounds and most phonetic alphabets
attempt to accomodate both as unambiguously as possible.

However, when we look at the Hebrew alphabet we don't see this phonomenon.
We largely see the Hebrew alphabet as mapping onto what we perceive as
consonants only (with the debatable exception of Yodh, Waw and word final
Heh). Why could this possibly be? Why is that the Hebrew alphabet uses the
ancient logograph for house as the letter b but does not have any symbol for
the many vowels which could follow it? Why would the massoretes later feel a
need to address this issue?

The answers to these questions can largely be answered by considering what
the ancients who developed this alphabet considered to be the reusable
phonetic unit. They evidently considered the syllable to be the reusable
phonetic unit and grouped 'allosyllables' into one reusable symbol. That is
to say that syllables ba be bi bo etc were all represented by the house
logograph. There are pros and cons to this system.The con is the level of
ambiguity it introduces. The pro is the increased reusability with a reduced
graph set.

So using such a highly reusable set of syllabic units of speech how do we go
about choosing which logographic symbol to use? Each group of allosyllables
was united by its initial consonant and so common (largely single syllable)
logographs were used. This is what we would naturally expect. Just take a
look at any English child's alphabet book. A is for apple. B is for...

And so it is this sequence of logic which leads many people to the intuitive
conclusion that Hebrew (or whatever it evolved from) was originally a CV
language. Hope this was followable and made sense to somebody. As always
when I write I aim to make the points I refer to accessible to all and so
the register of this explanation may not be what the more academic members
are accustomed to.

James Christian