IŋgliʃI got a bit sidetracked from Hebrew leading up to the weekend. I was sucked into a diaphonemic English orthography system that I've been working on. I learned about lexical sets, which were introduced by John C. Wells in his book Accents of English. Vowels in English are highly divergent phonetically between diffirent dialects. A lexical set is a group of words that tend to be pronounced the same within a dialect even though the pronunciation might be very different from dialect to dialect. For example, the word "square" will be pronounced differently by an American, an Englishman, an Irishman, or a Scot, but within a dialect it will generally rhyme with other words within the same lexical set such as "mare", "there", or "bear". So if vowel symbols match with lexical sets rather than specific sounds, then someone should be able to use these symbols regardless of dialect, although some words can be in different lexical sets in different dialects.
My orthography actually matched up pretty well with the lexical sets already. I tweaked it a little and added a couple more vowel symbols to match Wells' sets exactly. I'll be buying a copy of his book soon and that should help me refine it more. Until then I think I can hold off on my work on the orthography.
Here's a sample:
To̊ bē ôr not to̊ bē, ðat iz ðᵧ qescᵧn:
Ƕeðᵧr 'tiz nōblᵧr in ðᵧ mīnd to̊ sufᵧr
Ðᵧ sliŋz and arōz ov ŏtrạ̄jᵧs fôrtūn,
Ôr to̊ tāk årmz ᵧgānst ᵧ sē ov trubᵧlz
And bī ᵧpōziŋ end ðem. To̊ dī—to̊ slēp,
No mōr; and bī ᵧ slēp to̊ sā wē end
Ðᵧ hårtāk and ðᵧ þŏzᵧnd natūrᵧl ʃoks
Ðat fleʃ iz ār to̊; 'tiz ᵧ konsᵧmạ̄ʃᵧn
Divọ̆tlŷ to̊ bē wiʃt. To̊ dī, to̊ slēp;
To̊ slēp, pᵧrcâns to̊ drēm—ī, ðār'z ðᵧ rub:
Fôr in ðat slēp ov deþ, ƕot drēmz mā kum
Ƕen wē hav ʃufᵧld ôf ðis môrtᵧl ki̊l
Must giv us păz...
עבכיתI got back into the swing of things by the end of the weekend and now my Hebrew studies are back on track. I finished the first six lessons of Assimil. It's very, very slow in the beginning, but I think it will pick up once they have introduced the whole אלפבית.
I haven't found a good prepackaged vocabulary builder for Hebrew
that includes the exact pronunciation, but I found a terrific source that can be used to
build a vocabulary builder:
https://www.teachmehebrew.com/hebrew-fr ... -list.htmlIt lists Hebrew words without vowels, but it also has transliterations of all possible pronunciations, with the meaning of each one. This is perfect! I've started making an Anki deck with the Hebrew word and transliterations on one side and the definitions on the other. I'll be able to see a word and know basically what the pronunciation options are. I think this will give me the foundation I need to be able to use vowelless learning tools like Duolingo and Clozemaster.
ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦI think I sated my curiosity with Inuktitut so I'm done for now. I'll need to return to this wonderful language when I have a free "secondary language" slot in my queue! I also narrowly avoided getting into Turkish (although I'm still considering a quick dabble if I can get a taste of the vowel harmony system without too much vocab grinding) and !Xóõ (not enough resources available).