Mater lectionis
Encyclopedia
In the spelling of Hebrew
and some other Semitic languages
, matres lectionis (Latin
"mothers of reading", singular form: mater lectionis, Hebrew: אֵם קְרִיאָה mother of reading), refers to the use of certain consonants to indicate a vowel. The letters that do this in Hebrew are aleph
, he
, waw
(or vav) and yod
(or yud). The yod and waw in particular are more often vowels than they are consonants. In Arabic
, the matres lectionis (though they are much less often referred to thus) are alif
ا, waw
و, and ya'
ي, even though informal, de facto orthographies of spoken varieties of Arabic also use ha
to indicate a shorter version of alif, a usage augmented by the ambiguity of the use of ha and taa marbuta in formal Arabic orthography, and also a formal orthography in some languages that use Arabic script, such as Kurdish orthography.
, Moabite
, South Arabian
and the Phoenician
alphabet
s, but are widely used only in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and Arabic.
was to write the consonant
letters yod
י, waw
ו, he
ה,and aleph א. Originally א and ה were put only at the end of words, while י and ו were used mainly to write the original diphthongs [aw] and [ay], as well as original vowel+[y]+vowel sequences (which sometimes simplified to plain long vowels). So for example, ṣāděqā - she is righteous; ṣidqī - my righteousness; ṣidqō - his righteousness. Gradually, as this was found to be insufficient for differentiating between similar nouns, they were inserted in medial positions, e.g., ṣaddīq - righteous; ṣādōq – Zadok
.
Where words can be written either with or without matres lectionis, spellings that include these letters are called malē (Hebrew) or plene (Latin), meaning "full", while spellings without them are called ḥaser or defective. In some verb forms, matres lectionis are almost always used. In the 800's, it was decided that the system of matres lectionis did not suffice to indicate the vowels precisely enough, so a supplemental vowel pointing systems (niqqud) (diacritic symbols indicating vowel pronunciation and other important phonological features not written by the traditional basic consonantal orthography
) joined matres lectionis as part of the Hebrew writing system.
In some words in Hebrew there is a choice of whether to use a mater lectionis or not, and in modern printed texts matres lectionis are sometimes used even for short vowels, which is considered to be grammatically incorrect, though instances are found as far back as Talmud
ic times. Such texts from Israel were noticeably more inclined to malē spellings than texts from Babylonia
: this may reflect the influence of Greek, which had full alphabetic spelling. Similarly in the Middle Ages Ashkenazim
tended to use malē spellings under the influence of European languages, while Sephardim
tended to use ḥaser spellings under the influence of Arabic.
symbol, although the Othmani orthography
, the one in which the Qur'an is traditionally written and printed, has some differences which are not always consistent. Also, under influence from orthography of Europe
an languages, transliterating of borrowed words into Arabic is usually done using vowels in place of diacritics, even when the latter is more suitable, and even when transliterating words from another Semitic language, such as Hebrew, a phenomenon augmented by the neglect of diacritics in most printed forms since the beginning of mechanical printing.
), but it is occasionally used to indicate an a vowel. (However, a silent aleph — indicating an original glottal stop
consonant sound which has become silent in Hebrew pronunciation — can occur after almost any vowel.) At the end of a word, He ה can also be used to indicate that a vowel a should be pronounced.
Examples:
diphthongs.
In general terms, it is observable that early Phoenician
texts have very few matres lectionis, and that during most of the 1st millennium BCE. Hebrew and Aramaic were quicker to develop matres lectionis than Phoenician. However, in its latest period of development in North Africa (referred to as "Punic
"), the Phoenician language developed a very full use of matres lectionis (including the use of the letter `Ayin
ע, also used for this purpose much later in Yiddish orthography
).
In pre-exilic Hebrew, there was a significant development of the use of the letter He ה to indicate word final vowels other than ī and ū. This was probably inspired by the phonological change of the third-person singular possessive suffix from [ahū] > [aw] > [ō] in most environments. However, in later periods of Hebrew the orthography was changed so that word-final ō was no longer written with the letter He ה (except in a few archaically-spelled proper names, such as Solomon שלמה and Shiloh שלה). The difference between the spelling of the third-person singular possessive suffix (as attached to singular nouns) with He ה in early Hebrew vs. with waw ו in later Hebrew has become an issue in the authentication of the Jehoash Inscription.
According to Sass (5), already in the Middle Kingdom there were some cases of matres lectionis, i.e. consonant graphemes which were used to transcribe vowels in foreign words, namely in Punic (Jensen 290, Naveh 62), Aramaic, and Hebrew (he, waw, yod; sometimes even aleph; Naveh 62). Naveh (ibid.) notes that the earliest Aramaic and Hebrew
documents already used matres lectionis. Some scholars argue that therefore the Greeks must have borrowed their alphabet from the Arameans. But the practice has older roots: the Semitic cuneiform alphabet of Ugarit
(13th ct. BC) already has matres lectionis (Naveh 138).
and Uyghur
) and of the Hebrew alphabet (such as those used for the Yiddish
and Ladino languages), matres lectionis were generally used for all or most vowels, thus in effect becoming vowel letters: see Yiddish orthography
. This tendency was taken to its logical conclusion in fully alphabetic scripts such as the Greek, Roman and Cyrillic alphabets. The vowel letters in these languages historically go back to matres lectionis in the Phoenician script: for example, the letter
are adapted from matres lectionis in the version of the Aramaic script used for Pahlavi
.
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
and some other Semitic languages
Semitic languages
The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...
, matres lectionis (Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
"mothers of reading", singular form: mater lectionis, Hebrew: אֵם קְרִיאָה mother of reading), refers to the use of certain consonants to indicate a vowel. The letters that do this in Hebrew are aleph
Aleph
* Aleph or Alef is the first letter of the Semitic abjads descended from Proto-Canaanite, Arabic alphabet, Phoenician alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet-People:*Aleph , an Italo disco artist and alias of Dave Rodgers...
, he
He (letter)
He is the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician , Aramaic, Hebrew , Syriac and Arabic . Its sound value is a voiceless glottal fricative ....
, waw
Waw (letter)
Waw is the sixth letter of the Northwest Semitic family of scripts, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic ....
(or vav) and yod
Yodh
Yodh is the tenth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Yud , Syriac and Arabic...
(or yud). The yod and waw in particular are more often vowels than they are consonants. In Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
, the matres lectionis (though they are much less often referred to thus) are alif
Aleph
* Aleph or Alef is the first letter of the Semitic abjads descended from Proto-Canaanite, Arabic alphabet, Phoenician alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet-People:*Aleph , an Italo disco artist and alias of Dave Rodgers...
ا, waw
Waw (letter)
Waw is the sixth letter of the Northwest Semitic family of scripts, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic ....
و, and ya'
Yodh
Yodh is the tenth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Yud , Syriac and Arabic...
ي, even though informal, de facto orthographies of spoken varieties of Arabic also use ha
He (letter)
He is the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician , Aramaic, Hebrew , Syriac and Arabic . Its sound value is a voiceless glottal fricative ....
to indicate a shorter version of alif, a usage augmented by the ambiguity of the use of ha and taa marbuta in formal Arabic orthography, and also a formal orthography in some languages that use Arabic script, such as Kurdish orthography.
History
Because some Semitic languages lack vowel letters, unambiguous reading of a text might be difficult. Therefore, to indicate vowels (mostly long), consonant letters are used. For example, in the Hebrew construct-state form bēt, meaning "the house of", the middle letter "י" in the spelling בית acts as a vowel, whereas in the corresponding absolute-state form bayit ("house"), which is spelled the same, the same letter represents a genuine consonant. Matres lectionis are found in UgariticUgaritic alphabet
The Ugaritic script is a cuneiform abjad used from around 1400 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language, and discovered in Ugarit , Syria, in 1928. It has 30 letters...
, Moabite
Moabite language
The Moabite language is an extinct Canaanite language, spoken in Moab in the early first millennium BC. Most of our knowledge about Moabite comes from the Mesha Stele, as well as the El-Kerak Stela. The main features distinguishing Moabite from fellow Canaanite languages such as Hebrew are: a...
, South Arabian
South Arabian alphabet
The ancient Yemeni alphabet branched from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet in about the 9th century BC. It was used for writing the Yemeni Old South Arabic languages of the Sabaean, Qatabanian, Hadramautic, Minaean, Himyarite, and proto-Ge'ez in Dʿmt...
and the Phoenician
Phoenician alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia...
alphabet
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
s, but are widely used only in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and Arabic.
Hebrew
An early method for indicating long vowels using the Hebrew alphabetHebrew alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, or more historically, the Assyrian script, is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. There have been two...
was to write the consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
letters yod
Yodh
Yodh is the tenth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Yud , Syriac and Arabic...
י, waw
Waw (letter)
Waw is the sixth letter of the Northwest Semitic family of scripts, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic ....
ו, he
He (letter)
He is the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician , Aramaic, Hebrew , Syriac and Arabic . Its sound value is a voiceless glottal fricative ....
ה,and aleph א. Originally א and ה were put only at the end of words, while י and ו were used mainly to write the original diphthongs [aw] and [ay], as well as original vowel+[y]+vowel sequences (which sometimes simplified to plain long vowels). So for example, ṣāděqā - she is righteous; ṣidqī - my righteousness; ṣidqō - his righteousness. Gradually, as this was found to be insufficient for differentiating between similar nouns, they were inserted in medial positions, e.g., ṣaddīq - righteous; ṣādōq – Zadok
Zadok
Zadok was a high priest of the Israelites in Jerusalem after it was conquered by David.Zadok may also refer to:*Rabbi Zadok, tanna of the 1st-century CE*Zadok the Priest, an 18th-century coronation anthem by Handel...
.
Where words can be written either with or without matres lectionis, spellings that include these letters are called malē (Hebrew) or plene (Latin), meaning "full", while spellings without them are called ḥaser or defective. In some verb forms, matres lectionis are almost always used. In the 800's, it was decided that the system of matres lectionis did not suffice to indicate the vowels precisely enough, so a supplemental vowel pointing systems (niqqud) (diacritic symbols indicating vowel pronunciation and other important phonological features not written by the traditional basic consonantal orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
) joined matres lectionis as part of the Hebrew writing system.
In some words in Hebrew there is a choice of whether to use a mater lectionis or not, and in modern printed texts matres lectionis are sometimes used even for short vowels, which is considered to be grammatically incorrect, though instances are found as far back as Talmud
Talmud
The Talmud is a central text of mainstream Judaism. It takes the form of a record of rabbinic discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, philosophy, customs and history....
ic times. Such texts from Israel were noticeably more inclined to malē spellings than texts from Babylonia
Babylonia
Babylonia was an ancient cultural region in central-southern Mesopotamia , with Babylon as its capital. Babylonia emerged as a major power when Hammurabi Babylonia was an ancient cultural region in central-southern Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), with Babylon as its capital. Babylonia emerged as...
: this may reflect the influence of Greek, which had full alphabetic spelling. Similarly in the Middle Ages Ashkenazim
Ashkenazi Jews
Ashkenazi Jews, also known as Ashkenazic Jews or Ashkenazim , are the Jews descended from the medieval Jewish communities along the Rhine in Germany from Alsace in the south to the Rhineland in the north. Ashkenaz is the medieval Hebrew name for this region and thus for Germany...
tended to use malē spellings under the influence of European languages, while Sephardim
Sephardi Jews
Sephardi Jews is a general term referring to the descendants of the Jews who lived in the Iberian Peninsula before their expulsion in the Spanish Inquisition. It can also refer to those who use a Sephardic style of liturgy or would otherwise define themselves in terms of the Jewish customs and...
tended to use ḥaser spellings under the influence of Arabic.
Arabic
In Arabic there is no such choice, and the almost invariable rule is that a long vowel is written with a mater lectionis and a short vowel with a diacriticDiacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
symbol, although the Othmani orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
, the one in which the Qur'an is traditionally written and printed, has some differences which are not always consistent. Also, under influence from orthography of Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
an languages, transliterating of borrowed words into Arabic is usually done using vowels in place of diacritics, even when the latter is more suitable, and even when transliterating words from another Semitic language, such as Hebrew, a phenomenon augmented by the neglect of diacritics in most printed forms since the beginning of mechanical printing.
Syriac
Syriac-Aramaic vowels are classified into three groups: the Alap , the waw , and the yod . The mater lectionis was developed as early as the 6th century to represent long vowels which were earlier denoted by a dot under the line. The most frequent ones are the yod and the waw while the alap is mostly restricted to some transliterated words.Usage in Hebrew
Most commonly, yod י indicates i or e, while waw ו indicates o or u. Aleph א was not systematically developed as a mater lectionis in Hebrew (as it was in Aramaic and ArabicArabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
), but it is occasionally used to indicate an a vowel. (However, a silent aleph — indicating an original glottal stop
Glottal stop
The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...
consonant sound which has become silent in Hebrew pronunciation — can occur after almost any vowel.) At the end of a word, He ה can also be used to indicate that a vowel a should be pronounced.
Examples:
| Symbol | Name | Vowel formation | Vowel quality | Example | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Biblical | Modern Modern Hebrew Modern Hebrew , also known as Israeli Hebrew or Modern Israeli Hebrew, is the language spoken in Israel and in some Jewish communities worldwide, from the early 20th century to the present.... |
Hebrew | Transliteration Transliteration Transliteration is a subset of the science of hermeneutics. It is a form of translation, and is the practice of converting a text from one script into another... |
|||
| א | Alef | ê, ệ, ậ, â, ô | mostly ā | פארן | Paran | |
| ה | He | ê, ệ, ậ, â, ô | mostly ā or e | לאה | Leah Leah Leah , as described in the Hebrew Bible, is the first of the two concurrent wives of the Hebrew patriarch Jacob and mother of six of sons whose descendants became the Twelve Tribes of Israel, along with at least one daughter, Dinah. She is the daughter of Laban and the older sister of Rachel, whom... |
|
| משה | Moshe | |||||
| ו | Waw | Vav | ô, û | ō or ū | יואל | Yo'el |
| ברוך | Baruch Baruch Baruch has been a given name among Jews from Biblical times up to the present, on some occasions also used as surname. It is also found, though more rarely, among Christians—particularly among Protestants who use Old Testament names.... |
|||||
| י | Yod | Yud | î, ê, ệ | ī, ē or | דויד | David David David was the second king of the united Kingdom of Israel according to the Hebrew Bible and, according to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, an ancestor of Jesus Christ through both Saint Joseph and Mary... |
Origins and development
Historically, the practice of using matres lectionis seems to have originated when [ay] and [aw] diphthongs (written using the yod י and waw ו consonant letters respectively) monophthongized to simple long vowels [ē] and [ō]. This epiphenomenal association between consonant letters and vowel sounds was then seized upon and used in words without historicdiphthongs.
In general terms, it is observable that early Phoenician
Phoenician alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia...
texts have very few matres lectionis, and that during most of the 1st millennium BCE. Hebrew and Aramaic were quicker to develop matres lectionis than Phoenician. However, in its latest period of development in North Africa (referred to as "Punic
Punic language
The Punic language or Carthagian language is an extinct Semitic language formerly spoken in the Mediterranean region of North Africa and several Mediterranean islands, by people of the Punic culture.- Description :...
"), the Phoenician language developed a very full use of matres lectionis (including the use of the letter `Ayin
Ayin
' or ' is the sixteenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic . It is the twenty-first letter in the new Persian alphabet...
ע, also used for this purpose much later in Yiddish orthography
Yiddish orthography
The Yiddish language is written using Hebrew script as the basis of a full vocalic alphabet. This adaptation uses letters that are silent or glottal stops in Hebrew, as vowels in Yiddish...
).
In pre-exilic Hebrew, there was a significant development of the use of the letter He ה to indicate word final vowels other than ī and ū. This was probably inspired by the phonological change of the third-person singular possessive suffix from [ahū] > [aw] > [ō] in most environments. However, in later periods of Hebrew the orthography was changed so that word-final ō was no longer written with the letter He ה (except in a few archaically-spelled proper names, such as Solomon שלמה and Shiloh שלה). The difference between the spelling of the third-person singular possessive suffix (as attached to singular nouns) with He ה in early Hebrew vs. with waw ו in later Hebrew has become an issue in the authentication of the Jehoash Inscription.
According to Sass (5), already in the Middle Kingdom there were some cases of matres lectionis, i.e. consonant graphemes which were used to transcribe vowels in foreign words, namely in Punic (Jensen 290, Naveh 62), Aramaic, and Hebrew (he, waw, yod; sometimes even aleph; Naveh 62). Naveh (ibid.) notes that the earliest Aramaic and Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
documents already used matres lectionis. Some scholars argue that therefore the Greeks must have borrowed their alphabet from the Arameans. But the practice has older roots: the Semitic cuneiform alphabet of Ugarit
Ugaritic alphabet
The Ugaritic script is a cuneiform abjad used from around 1400 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language, and discovered in Ugarit , Syria, in 1928. It has 30 letters...
(13th ct. BC) already has matres lectionis (Naveh 138).
Influence on other languages
Later, in some adaptations of the Arabic alphabet (such those used for PersianPersian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
and Uyghur
Uyghur language
Uyghur , formerly known as Eastern Turk, is a Turkic language with 8 to 11 million speakers, spoken primarily by the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western China. Significant communities of Uyghur-speakers are located in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and various other...
) and of the Hebrew alphabet (such as those used for the Yiddish
Yiddish language
Yiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages...
and Ladino languages), matres lectionis were generally used for all or most vowels, thus in effect becoming vowel letters: see Yiddish orthography
Yiddish orthography
The Yiddish language is written using Hebrew script as the basis of a full vocalic alphabet. This adaptation uses letters that are silent or glottal stops in Hebrew, as vowels in Yiddish...
. This tendency was taken to its logical conclusion in fully alphabetic scripts such as the Greek, Roman and Cyrillic alphabets. The vowel letters in these languages historically go back to matres lectionis in the Phoenician script: for example, the letter
Avestan language
Avestan is an East Iranian language known only from its use as the language of Zoroastrian scripture, i.e. the Avesta, from which it derives its name...
are adapted from matres lectionis in the version of the Aramaic script used for Pahlavi
Pahlavi scripts
Pahlavi or Pahlevi denotes a particular and exclusively written form of various Middle Iranian languages. The essential characteristics of Pahlavi are*the use of a specific Aramaic-derived script, the Pahlavi script;...
.
See also
- Hebrew spellingHebrew spellingThere are several systems of Hebrew spelling that are used. The Hebrew alphabet contains 22 letters, all of which are primarily consonants. This is because the Hebrew script is an abjad, that is, its letters indicate consonant, not vowels, nor syllables...
- Niqqud
- Ktiv maleKtiv maleKtiv hasar niqqud , are the rules for writing Hebrew without vowel pointers , often replacing them with matres lectionis . To avoid confusion, consonantal ו and י are doubled in the middle of words...
- Mappiq
- Tiberian vocalizationTiberian vocalizationThe Tiberian vocalization is a system of diacritics devised by the Masoretes to add to the consonantal Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible; this system soon became used to vocalize other texts as well...
- TengwarTengwarThe Tengwar are an artificial script created by J. R. R. Tolkien. In his fictional universe of Middle-earth, the tengwar were invented by the Elf Fëanor, and used first to write the Elven tongues: Quenya, Telerin, and also Valarin. Later a great number of languages of Middle-earth were written...