I am trying to find a document that clearly explains how to apply Hebrew vowels (and what all the combining characters are for Hebrew vowels), but I haven't been able to find anything after a few hours of searching.
The best I was able to find is this:
However, it's still unclear to me how to use them.
The two parts to my question are:
- What all the symbols are related to vowels. Related to this is if all vowel symbols are "combining characters", or if some of them are full on standalone characters.
- What the rules are for applying the symbols to consonants.
For (2) I am wondering if simply you can apply any vowel symbol to any consonant symbol. So any of the vowel combining characters (from the unknown complete set of vowel combining characters) can be combined with any of the consonants (clearly laid out on Wikipedia).
For (1), my complete list is as follows:
a ä חַ ַ Patakh
a ä חָ ָ Kamatz
a ä חֲ ֲ Reduced Patakh
e e̞ חֵ ֵ Tzeire
e e̞ חֱ ֱ Reduced Segol
e e̞ חֶ ֶ Segol
i i חִ ִ Hiriq
o o̞ חֹ ֹ Holam
o o̞ חֳ ֳ Reduced Kamatz
u u חּ ּ Shuruk
' - חְ ְ Sh'va
The third column is an example consonant it is applied to, and the fourth column is the combining character by itself.
Where I get confused is stuff like this:
- Holam Haser and Holam Male defined here both have the same unicode character, but the image of each is different. I don't understand.
So I am wondering if my table above is complete, or if there are any other vowels I am missing. And then if my assumption that you can apply the vowels to any consonant is correct, or if not, which ones each can be applied to.