The powerful story behind the Hebrew letter Alef

David wrote this chapter in an acrostic pattern and every letter of the alphabet is followed by 8 verses. I thought it would be fun to study Psalm 119 by summarizing each alphabetic section in an acrostic format. The process of writing Hebrew words in the Roman alphabet is known as transliteration. Transliteration is more an art than a science, and opinions on the correct way to transliterate words vary widely. This is why the Jewish festival of lights (in Hebrew, Cheit-Nun-Kaf-Hei) is spelled Chanukah, Chanukah, Hanuka, and many other interesting ways. Each spelling has a legitimate phonetic and orthographic basis; none is right or wrong.

That’s why you may have heard people speak of the female coming-of-age ceremony as a bas mitzvah instead of a bat mitzvah. The ritual of circumcision is most commonly referred to as a bris. With Vav, as we saw above, it usually indicates a “u” sound instead of the usual “v” sound. With most letters, the dagesh does not significantly affect pronunciation. With the letters Bet, Kaf and Pe, however, the dagesh indicates that the letter should be pronounced with its hard sound rather than the soft sound .

Styles of Writing

Vav, usually a consonant pronounced as a “v,” is sometimes a vowel pronounced “oo” or “oh” . When it is pronounced “oo”, pointed texts have a dagesh. When it is pronounced “oh”, pointed texts have a dot on top. The table at right illustrates the vowel points, along with their pronunciations.

It is very easy to switch between Hebrew and English within a document. DavkaWriter even comes with little stickers to put on the keys of your keyboard so you can learn their keyboard mappings, and an onscreen display shows you their keyboard mappings. Davka also has a lot of fonts available, as well as a lot of other Hebrew and Judaic software.

Hebrew Alphabet – Aleph Bet Poster – 13″×19″

Many primal words in Hebrew, both nouns and verbs are based on two consonants. They all have only two pure consonant sound in their root. A fun fact unbeknown even to many Israelis, is that the names and the shapes of the Hebrew letters are based on ancient pictograms borrowed to represent sound. It is too long and complicated a topic to delve into in this post, and if you wish to know more about it, I highly recommend watching the series ‘Major Moments in the History of Writing’ by NativeLang on Youtube. The origin of the name ‘Alef’ is not entirely clear. It is believed to have derived from the Hebrew word אָלוּף .

• All photos and written information are the sole creation of Angie Ouellette-Tower..
• In order to be actually able to pronounce words, you need vowels.
• Shin is pronounced “sh” when it has a dot over the right branch and “s” when it has a dot over the left branch.
• The order of the letters is irrelevant to their value; letters are simply added to determine the total numerical value.
• It makes a consonant called “glottal stop”, as in “co’operate” or “re’enact”.

(alef-lamed-peh) gives me’ulaf, the passive participle of the verb le’alef, meaning ‘trained’ or ‘tamed’ ; the IDF rank of aluf, taken from an Edomite title of nobility, is also cognate. [geh-ooh-lah], is the presence of the letter aleph. When aleph is placed into our lives in exile, we bring the redemption. We created a collection of worksheets that you can download for free! You will be able to download the file once you complete your checkout.

Relyef

On that note, let me share with you one last detail on the letter Alef before I sign off. Remember earlier in this article when I said that the shape and names of the Hebrew letters are based on ancient pictograms? Well, the third letter in the name of the letter Alef is Peh which means mouth. I have been thinking a lot about what the topic of the first post should be. Then it hit me – since it’s the first post I should write about the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet. It signifies beginnings and therefore it is the best place to start.

Kaf, Mem, Nun, Peh and Tzadeh all are written differently when they appear at the end of a word than when they appear in the beginning or middle of the word. The version used at the end of a word is referred to as Final Kaf, Final Mem, etc. The version of the letter on the left is the final version.

The longest chapter in the Bible is Psalm 119. If you turn to Psalm 119 in your Bible you will notice that there is a strange word every 8 verses. These “strange” words BNB are the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

Understanding the letters provides essential insight into the deeper meanings of the Bible. So I just recited the letters and asked God to make words out of them. Of Hebrew letters and particularly that of the letter Aleph. Like a man without a head, Aleph can’t make a sound, without a vowel attached. Aleph is the first letter of the Alephbet, the Hebrew alphabet.

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As a Chinese teacher from hebrew alphabet aleph, what I like to do is to compare the Hebrew letters with the Chinese character with the same meaning as the ancient pictogram. The number 11 would be rendered Yod-Alef, the number 12 would be Yod-Bet, the number 21 would be Kaf-Alef, the word Torah (Tav-Vav-Resh-He) has the numerical value 611, etc. The only significant oddity in this pattern is the number 15, which if rendered as 10+5 would be a name of G-d, so it is normally written Tet-Vav (9+6). The order of the letters is irrelevant to their value; letters are simply added to determine the total numerical value. The number 11 could be written as Yod-Alef, Alef-Yod, Heh-Vav, Dalet-Dalet-Gimmel or many other combinations of letters.

I did not know anything about the Hebrew language, so I did a little research. The Hebrew language is written from the right to the left – opposite of the English language. Today we will be starting with the letter ALEPH. The Roman letters in Table 1 above are probably the most common transliterations of those consonants in America, except that Khaf is often transliterated as ch.

The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet is called Alef. In Hebrew this name is written אל”ף and the apostrophes are there to mark it is not a word but a letter’s name. Here it how the letter itself is written in Modern Hebrew. There is another style used for handwriting, in much the same way that cursive is used for the Roman alphabet. This modern script style is illustrated below, at right. This style of writing is known as STA”M (an abbreviation for “Sifrei Torah, Tefillin and Mezuzot,” which is where you will see that style of writing.

In all cases except https://www.beaxy.com/ Mem, the final version has a long tail. Represents God, as it is the first letter of one of God’s names י-ה-ו-ה and is reaching for the heavens. The lower yud represents the Jewish people, called יהודים [Yeh-hoo-deem] in Hebrew. Every language in the world, Hebrew consists of words made up of individual letters.

The picture to the right illustrates the hebrew alphabet aleph alphabet, in Hebrew alphabetical order. The Hebrew alphabet is often called the “alef-bet,” because of its first two letters. Additionally, this Gematria also relates to the aleph and connects God to His oneness. As mentioned, aleph is made up of two yuds and a vav. So, the gematria of the upper yud plus the lower yud equals twenty. The value of these three letters which make up the shape of aleph is 26.

The letters only mark consonants, which means that when you look at a word you would have no idea how it is pronounced. The vowels would be explained immediately after this section. But we will begin with the two, first consonants. K’tav Ivri is understood to be in the nature of a font, like Rashi script, rather than in the nature of a different alphabet, like Greek, Cyrillic or Roman. The Hebrew and Yiddish languages use a different alphabet than English.

• Each spelling has a legitimate phonetic and orthographic basis; none is right or wrong.
• This is why the Jewish festival of lights (in Hebrew, Chet-Nun-Kaf-Heh) is spelled Chanukkah, Hannukah, Hanukkah, and many other interesting ways.
• The vowels would be explained immediately after this section.
• Note that there are two versions of some letters.
• The Talmud talks about final forms of letters in the original Torah, but K’tav Ivri doesn’t have final forms.