I am learning Hebrew & I have noticed the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are more like words. For instance, in my native English language, A is the first letter of the alphabet, but in Hebrew it is Aleph. Why is this? If I was born in Palestine & was to be learning English, would I be asking a similar question (but the other way)?
Hi, welcome to the forum! I know a little bit about Hebrew, used to study it but I didn't get too far. Letters are just sounds, and I believe it's really the sound that is written out here. That is, the sound of the letter when not used in a word, but spoken by itself. I too have wondered about this, but I think there's a concept here that is difficult to grasp when comparing our alphabet to Hebrew. I do know that transliterating Hebrew to English isn't an exact science. There's a bunch of different ways to spell Hanukkah, for example, in English (Chanukkah, Chanuka, etc), and all of them are technically correct. You can't "translate" Hebrew to English, but you can transliterate it. I think somewhere in there is the answer you're looking for, but the explanation is a bit elusive. I've even looked it up before and I don't ever remember getting an answer to this. I think it's more complicated than one explanation possibly?
I wonder if it's an Eastern-Western thing, as in Greek and the Middle Eastern languages being, well, eastern, and Latin and the languages that came from it being western. I mean, the Greek alphabet words the same way: Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, etc. (Aleph, bet', gimil, dalet', heh . . . and don't forget to write from right to left.)
But not by themselves sir for that is a singularity. Perhaps I should reconcile. 'A' should be rewritten/re-sounded as "Aaye." There. Now that is just as much of a "word" as aleph. It is my understanding that it takes vowel (aaaaeeeeiiiooouuuuu) for speech to occur. To rid vowel from alphabet would be to collapse it. Btw, I'm learning Hebrew so I can read the clouds. Someday I'll get to the stars
There's more to it than that... -aaa- -eee- -iii- -ooo- -uuu- (positive & negative infinities) These are THE continuous sounds a human body can produce. Fundamentals. From these (infinite sins & cosines), you produce all other sounds. Whether or not Hebrew has any vowels doesn't matter; it's still phonetic, which means it needs to be sounded out. My best analogy is that of a string instrument, say a violin. You can't pluck a note [a consonant] if the violin isn't strung. Maxwell had a really good analogy involving ripples in a pond. That was with light, but they're both waves
