Mater lectionis

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Matres lectionis (Latin "mothers of reading", singular form: mater lectionis) (Hebrew: אֵם קְרִיאָה mother reading) is used for certain Hebrew consonants that can sometimes fill the position of a vowel. The letters that do this are alef, he, vav and yud. The yud and vav in particular are more often vowels than they are consonants.

History

This is an early method for indicating vowels using the Hebrew alphabet. The consonant letters Yud י, Vav ו and Aleph א were used to give a rough indication of long vowels. Where words can be written either with or without matres lectionis, spellings that include these letters are called plene (full); spellings without them are called defective. In some verb forms, matres lectionis are used almost always.

Usage

Most commonly, Yod י indicates i or e, while Vav ו indicates o or u. Aleph א was not systematically developed as a mater lectionis in Hebrew (as it was in Aramaic and Arabic), 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 should be pronounced.

Examples:

Symbol	Name	Vowel formation	Vowel quality	Example
Symbol	Name	Vowel formation	Vowel quality	Hebrew	Transliteration
א	Alef	ê, ệ, ậ, â, ô	mostly ā	פארן	Paran
ה	Hei	ê, ệ, ậ, â, ô	mostly ā or e	לאה	Leah
ה	Hei	ê, ệ, ậ, â, ô	mostly ā or e	שה	Seh
ו	Vav	ô, û	ō or ū	יואל	Yo'el
ו	Vav	ô, û	ō or ū	ברוך	Baruch
י	Yud	î, ê, ệ	ī, ē or ǣ	דויד	David

Later, it became clear that the system of matres lectionis did not suffice to indicate the vowels precisely enough, so that supplemental vowel pointing systems (diacritic symbols indicating vowel pronunciation and other important phonological features not written by the traditional basic consonantal orthography) were developed accordingly.

Origins and development

Historically, the practice of using matres lectionis seems to have originated when [ay] and [aw] diphthongs (written using the Yud י and Vav 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 historic diphthongs.

In general terms, it is observable that early Phoenician texts have very few matres lectionis, and that during most of the 1st millennium B.C.E. 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 Vav 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 (hei, vav, yud; 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).

Bibliography

Garr, W. Randall. 1985. Dialect Geography of Syria-Palestine, 1000-586 B.C.E. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jensen, Hans. 1970. Sign Symbol and Script. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Transl. of Die Schrift in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften. 1958, as revised by the author.

Naveh, Joseph. 1979. Die Entstehung des Alphabets. Transl. of Origins of the Alphabet. Zürich und Köln. Benziger.

Sass, Benjamin. 1991. Studia Alphabetica. On the origin and early history of the Northwest Semitic, South Semitic and Greek alphabets. CH-Freiburg: Universitätsverlag Freiburg Schweiz. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Mater lectionis

History

Usage

Origins and development

Bibliography

See also