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This may be a silly question though I am unsure of this is the case for Hebrew.

I know often the vowels are not shown in Hebrew in writing. Curious if it changes the words can be interpreted many ways or not.

In English for example "rd" could be road, read, rude, rad, rod, etc. Is this also the case in Hebrew? Or does everyone reading understand what the word is, even without context clues.

2 Answers 2

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While there can always be some ambiguity, Hebrew and other Semitic languages have a system of triconsonantal roots, in which each sequence of three consonants suggests the meaning of the word. For example, the root k-t-b, meaning "to write", is used to derive words like kāṯaḇti כתבתי "I wrote", kāṯaḇ כתב "he wrote", kattāḇ כתב "reporter" (m), kəṯāḇ כתב "handwriting", kəṯōḇeṯ כתובת "address", and kəṯīḇ כתיב "spelling" (m).

As you can see, several of these have identical or very similar spelling, so there is some amount of guessing based on the context (the sentence "a reporter wrote about his handwriting": "כתב כתב על כתב ידו", has the word "כתב" repeated three times, but one can probably guess it's not saying "a handwriting reporter-ed about his wrote"), but as unlike in English, triconsonantal roots are an inherent part of Hebrew, some of the context is helped by recognizing the k-t-b root.

To use your example, the reason "rd" wouldn't be as understandable in English is that the history of English vocabulary includes vowels and has many words with the same consonants, if English had had the same morphological system as Hebrew it's likely we'd have the root r-d connected to, say, the general meaning of "road", and words with an r-d root might include things like "road", "pavement", "asphalt", "carriage tracks", etc., while words like "read" or "rude" could be folded in under other roots with generalized meanings like "to read" or "to insult".

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    sing,sang,sung; write,wrote,written. ride,road.
    – user6726
    Oct 9, 2019 at 16:45
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    Is there any evidence that abjads were developed without vowels specifically because of the existence of the Semitic triconsonantal root system? I keep hearing it as a justification, but to me subjectively it seems like the many meanings that a triconsonantal root can assume can be enough cause for confusion for vowels to be desirable. So do we have a specific reason to believe this is the... reason, or is it just that some linguists thought it made sense as an explanation for the lack of vowels, and then it stuck as a classic justification?
    – LjL
    Oct 9, 2019 at 18:04
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    @LjL Right, so this question is a little hard to answer because in general in linguistics we do not ask why something did not happen (unless there is sufficient cross-linguistic material to suggest that it would normally happen). We also don't have much evidence, so the earliest alphabetic writing (Proto-Canaanite) is not fully deciphered. Nevertheless we have enough data to say the following, based on Joseph Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet, Jerusalem / Leiden 1982, pp. 23–42 (summary on p. 42):
    – Keelan
    Oct 10, 2019 at 6:57
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    @LjL (1) Proto-Canaanite was invented ca. 1700 BC by Canaanites with some knowledge of hieroglyphs; (2) the letter signs mostly had acrophonic values. See wiki for some certain values, e.g. aleph from ʔalp 'ox'. This combined with the fact that the Canaanite syllable structure is CV or CVC, but never starts with V, leads to all letters having a consonantal value.
    – Keelan
    Oct 10, 2019 at 7:01
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    @NadavHar'El (1) I don't think this is a good representation of the development. The Phoenicians did not sit down and think what would be a good representation of their language; the script was formed organically from predecessors. They did not make the decision to leave out vowel signs but simply never thought about it - they also did not think about adding consonant length, pitch, emphasis, punctuation, etc. for the same reasons. (2) Hebrew developed vowel signs already around 1000 BCE if you count matres lectionis.
    – Keelan
    Oct 10, 2019 at 7:09
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Chiming in a bit late, but of course vowels can change the meaning of a word in Hebrew, sometimes drastically. Just as a favorite example, the word לבנה can be read, depending on diacritical marking ("nikkud") as:

LEVENAH (brick), LEVANA (white, feminine gender), LIVNEH (a genus of shrub, Styrax), LIVNAH (to her son), LIBNAH (she clarified), LEVONAH (frankincense), LABNEH (strained yogurt)... And I can think of at least three additional variations, I expect there are more than that.

Still, most of the time a native reader will know which word was meant from context. The times when it is not immediately clear are a great source of puns and written humor.

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