Hebrew alphabet
Semitic alphabet used for writing Hebrew, Samaritan, Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish, and other Jewish languages
The Hebrew alphabet (Hebrew: אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי, alefbét ‘ivrí), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is traditionally an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian.
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Quotes
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- לְפִיכָךְ צָרִיךְ לְהִזָּהֵר בְּצוּרַת הָאוֹתִיּוֹת שֶׁלֹּא תִּדְמֶה הַיּוּ״ד לְוָא״ו וְלֹא וָא״ו לְיוּ״ד וְלֹא כָּ״ף לְבֵי״ת וְלֹא בֵּי״ת לְכָ״ף וְלֹא דָּלֶ״ת לְרֵי״שׁ וְלֹא רֵי״שׁ לְדָלֶ״ת
- Maimonides: Sefer Ahavah, "Tefillin, Mezuzah and the Torah Scroll" 1:19
- Translation:
- One must be careful with regard to the form of the letters, so that a yud [י] will not resemble a vav [ו], nor a vav [ו] a yud [י]; a kaf [כ] should not resemble a beit [ב], nor a beit [ב] a kaf [כ]; a dalet [ד] should not resemble a resh [ר], nor a resh [ר] a dalet [ד].
- Eliyahu Touger translation, with additional brackets for clarity.
- One must be careful with regard to the form of the letters, so that a yud [י] will not resemble a vav [ו], nor a vav [ו] a yud [י]; a kaf [כ] should not resemble a beit [ב], nor a beit [ב] a kaf [כ]; a dalet [ד] should not resemble a resh [ר], nor a resh [ר] a dalet [ד].
- בשלשים ושתים נתיבות פליאות חכמה חקק יה יהוה צבאות אלהי ישראל אלהים חיים ומלך עולם אל שדי רחום וחנון רם ונשא שוכן עד מרום וקדוש שמו וברא את עולמו בשלשה ספרים בספר וספר וספור׃ עשר ספירות בלי מה ועשרים ושתים אותיות יסוד שלש אמות ושבע כפולות ושתים עשרה פשוטות׃
- Sefer Yetzirah 1:1–2
- Translation:
- By thirty-two mysterious paths of wisdom Yah has engraved [all things], [who is] the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, the living God, the Almighty God, He that is uplifted and exalted, He that Dwells forever, and whose Name is holy; having created His world by three [derivatives] of [the Hebrew root-word] sefar : namely, sefer (a book), sefor (a count) and sippur (a story), along with ten calibrations of empty space, twenty-two letters [of the Hebrew alphabet], [of which] three are principal [letters] (i.e. א מ ש), seven are double-sounding [consonants] (i.e. בג״ד כפר״ת) and twelve are ordinary [letters] (i.e. ה ו ז ח ט י ל נ ס ע צ ק).
- Yosef Qafih: Sefer Yetzirah Hashalem (with Rabbi Saadia Gaon's Commentary), p. 35. The Committee for Publishing the Books of Rabbi Saadia Gaon, Jerusalem (1972).
- By thirty-two mysterious paths of wisdom Yah has engraved [all things], [who is] the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, the living God, the Almighty God, He that is uplifted and exalted, He that Dwells forever, and whose Name is holy; having created His world by three [derivatives] of [the Hebrew root-word] sefar : namely, sefer (a book), sefor (a count) and sippur (a story), along with ten calibrations of empty space, twenty-two letters [of the Hebrew alphabet], [of which] three are principal [letters] (i.e. א מ ש), seven are double-sounding [consonants] (i.e. בג״ד כפר״ת) and twelve are ordinary [letters] (i.e. ה ו ז ח ט י ל נ ס ע צ ק).
- For reasons that remain obscure, in the case of the Palestinian Jews of Fustat, or Old Cairo—who worshipped in what would eventually become known as the Ben Ezra synagogue—the tradition of geniza was, it seems, extended to include the preservation of anything written in Hebrew letters, not only religious documents, and not just in the Hebrew language. Perhaps, as one scholar has proposed, "the very employment of the Hebrew script … sanctified written material."
- Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole: Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, ch. 1, "Hidden Wisdom", p. 14. Schocken Books (2011). ISBN 978-0-8052-4258-4.
- One way or another, the alphabet created a possibility that never existed before, namely of a society of mass, even universal, literacy. With only twenty-two symbols, it could be taught, in a relatively short time, to everyone. We see evidence of this at many places in Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah says "All your children shall be taught of the Lord and great shall be the peace of your children" (Isaiah 54:13), implying universal education.
- Jonathan Sacks: Exodus: The Book of Redemption. Maggid Books (2010). ISBN: 1-59264-021-4.
- The Ezra SIL fonts are the identical typeface to the SIL Ezra font released by SIL in 1997. The font was developed from the beautiful Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia volume which is familiar to many biblical Hebrew scholars.
- Ezra SIL Hebrew Unicode Fonts Installation Guide, p. 6. SIL International (2007).
- In the past, Hebrew text was supported on different platforms, and even between different applications, using a variety of standard and not-so-standard 8-bit encodings. Because the fonts that supported these encodings tended to be 'dumb' fonts, i.e. without built-in layout intelligence, often multiple fonts would be needed to correctly display complex texts such as found in Biblical scholarship. … Unicode and OpenType solve these problems by using a unique code for each Hebrew consonant and mark, and employing layout intelligence to map from the encoded characters to the appropriate arrangement of glyphs to display a given text.
- John Hudson: SBL Hebrew Font User Manual, p. 5. Version 1.51 (February 2008). Society of Biblical Literature.
- Taamey D does not claim to be generally applicable. It supports many words outside its corpus, but this support is accidental. It often supports its specific corpus through general means, leading to this "accidental generality." … It supports those out-of-corpus cases because it was easier to support multiple accents in a somewhat general way than it would have been to add special-case support for only the in-corpus cases.
- Ben Denckla: The Taamey D font for Biblical Hebrew (2023-03-13)
