Hebrew: Which vowels fit?

[ikarus 280]

Hi,

I have just learned that vowels are usually not indicated in Hebrew, whence non natives have to guess when reading. I have also heard that there are sometimes more possibilities, i.e. the meaning of a word can be changed by simulfigation. But none of the articles and videos I have seen about Hebrew named any rule concerning the different options there are when inserting vowels between consonants. I understand that there is no 100% rule but I would be delighted to have at least some rules. (There are basically 5 vowels in Hebrew (not including the diphtongs) so that I could try to take the correct one by plain guessing and hence have a probability of 20%.) Isn't there any linguistic explanation teachers don't tell their students due to its "difficulty"? In Hungarian for instance there is not a single word ending with an o or an ö, only words inflected with a translative-suffix can have an á-ending. Are there any rules like this in Hebrew? Thanks.

Bye!

[aokoye]

Hi,

I have just learned that vowels are usually not indicated in Hebrew, whence non natives have to guess when reading. I have also heard that there are sometimes more possibilities, i.e. the meaning of a word can be changed by simulfigation. But none of the articles and videos I have seen about Hebrew named any rule concerning the different options there are when inserting vowels between consonants. I understand that there is no 100% rule but I would be delighted to have at least some rules. (There are basically 5 vowels in Hebrew (not including the diphtongs) so that I could try to take the correct one by plain guessing and hence have a probability of 20%.) Isn't there any linguistic explanation teachers don't tell their students due to its "difficulty"? In Hungarian for instance there is not a single word ending with an o or an ö, only words inflected with a translative-suffix can have an á-ending. Are there any rules like this in Hebrew? Thanks.

Bye!

So first I don't know what you mean by "simulfigation" and google is showing zero hits. I'm assuming if it's an English word it's a typo but I can't get my head around what you meant to say. That said, I'm pretty sure there isn't a rule, I could be wrong but given that you can have words with different vowels that have the exact same consonants I would be surprised if there was a rule. Well ok - there are some rules surrounding the alef, heh, yud, and vav so maybe that's what you're thinking about. That said those are fairly obvious once you get the hang of it and there are tons of exceptions.

I'm taking a beginning Modern Hebrew class right now and the book we're using only uses nikud (vowels) when you first see the word at the very first page of the chapter in a list with the new words (my professor has us go around and say each word - it's purely an exercise in pronunciation), the first time you see the word in a sentence, and then in the word list at end of each chapter (we're using Hebrew from Scratch). That means there are three times per word that you will see it with the vowels, all of the other times are without nikud. What I've found helpful is to learn the words in Anki (or your word drilling method of choice) and then not try to rely on the nikud in any other arena. There are posts and i'm sure papers that have said that learning Hebrew (and likely Arabic) words in isolation with nikud isn't helpful - that you should just never use nikud, but what I'm doing has been working.

I should also note that in Israel children learn with nikud through third grade. After third grade they are expected to be able to read without them. From what my professor, who is a native speaker, has told me native speakers use dictionaries a lot, especially for foreign words and names. Otherwise they just won't know how a word is pronounced.

[ikarus 280]

Thank you very much; I have also thought of just seeing the words once or twice with vowel marking and then learn it by heart.

There may not be a word for inserting simulfixes but if suffix and suffigation exist, why not derive simulfigation from simulfix. That might not be entirely correct either because it is not always necessarily about morphemes but a nice sounding word anyway...

[aokoye]

There may not be a word for inserting simulfixes but if suffix and suffigation exist, why not derive simulfigation from simulfix. That might not be entirely correct either because it is not always necessarily about morphemes but a nice sounding word anyway...

Oh ok, a simulfix is a type of affix! Ok this makes more sense to me now (I also just didn't know the word so I couldn't reason that simulfigation came from that). From some quick research what you're thinking of isn't simulfix isn't what you thinking of rather transfixation. The transfixation in verbs does indicate the way that you conjugate them (if I had more energy right now I would give you an example but search Binyanim on google or your search engine of choice and I think you'll at least kind of understand what I'm saying.

I have also thought of just seeing the words once or twice with vowel marking and then learn it by heart.

That's more or less what I'm doing. My Anki settings have me seeing them five times before they are placed in the first section of the deck (it took a while for me to figure out the best Anki settings for me in terms of steps) but it definitely is working well for me.

[Doitsujin]

Isn't there any linguistic explanation teachers don't tell their students due to its "difficulty"?

1. In Semitic languages words are formed from roots using a limited and well-defined number of patterns. I.e., most words can only have a limited number of vowel sequences, which is lower than the total number of statistically possible vowel sequences.

2. The most likely pattern can usually be determined by context. I.e., if you look at the words immediately before and after an ambiguous word, you can usually narrow down the possible vowel sequences to a small number of possible candidates, which you can further narrow down by knowledge of common collocations and general vocabulary knowledge.

3. Vowels are overrated and most language learners have great pattern recognition skills. For example if I gave you the following English sentence without vowels, you'd most likely be able to understand it:

sh.   m.t   h.r   s.st.r   y.s.t.rd.y

For example, the first word could theoretically be read as sha, she, shi, sho, shu, shy; only she and shy are actually words and shy is rarely used as the first word of a sentence.

[aokoye]

Isn't there any linguistic explanation teachers don't tell their students due to its "difficulty"?

1. In Semitic languages words are formed from roots using a limited and well-defined number of patterns. I.e., most words can only have a limited number of vowel sequences, which is lower than the total number of statistically possible vowel sequences.

It should be noted that the second link is only relevant to verbs. I have a feeling the logic in terms of "these are the only vowels that can go with this root" only applies to verbs but I could be wrong.

[Doitsujin]

It should be noted that the second link is only relevant to verbs. I have a feeling the logic in terms of "these are the only vowels that can go with this root" only applies to verbs but I could be wrong.

It also applies to noun/adjectives and adverbs derived from them. BTW, there are a couple of vowel frequency studies, but, IMHO, there of little help to beginners.

Unfortunately, most students will indeed have to learn vocabulary items with vowel signs first.

[aokoye]

It should be noted that the second link is only relevant to verbs. I have a feeling the logic in terms of "these are the only vowels that can go with this root" only applies to verbs but I could be wrong.

It also applies to noun/adjectives and adverbs derived from them. BTW, there are a couple of vowel frequency studies, but, IMHO, there of little help to beginners.

Interesting and good to know. Do you have links to any of the studies (it's fine if they're behind a paywall - I'll probably be able to access them through my university's journal subscriptions)?

[Doitsujin]

Interesting and good to know. Do you have links to any of the studies (it's fine if they're behind a paywall - I'll probably be able to access them through my university's journal subscriptions)?

I looked into this many years ago, before the advent of machine learning and neural networks. A quick Google search turned up the follow MSc paper, which provides a good summary:

Automatic Hebrew Text Vocalization by Eran Tomer (PDF link)

If you look at the bibliography at the end of the thesis, you'll find references to some mainly lexico-statistical based disambiguation methods.

[aokoye]

Interesting and good to know. Do you have links to any of the studies (it's fine if they're behind a paywall - I'll probably be able to access them through my university's journal subscriptions)?

I looked into this many years ago, before the advent of machine learning and neural networks. A quick Google search turned up the follow MSc paper, which provides a good summary:

Automatic Hebrew Text Vocalization by Eran Tomer (PDF link)

If you look at the bibliography at the end of the thesis, you'll find references to some mainly lexico-statistical based disambiguation methods.

Awesome - I'll look through the bibliography. I have three friends who will be very interested in this - they're also linguistics students who are taking Hebrew because it meets the "you need to two terms of a non indo-european language for the BA in applied linguistics" requirement.