Mater lectionis

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Matres lectionis (Latin "mothers of reading", singular form: mater lectionis) is an early method for indicating vowels in the Hebrew alphabet. The consonant letters Yod י, Waw ו and ’Aleph א were used to give a rough indication of the quality of long vowels. Most commonly, Yod י indicates i or e, while Waw 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. In some verb forms, matres lectionis are used almost always. Examples:

Letter	Name	vowel quality	Example
א	Aleph	mostly ā	פארן Pārān מלא Millō
ה	He	mostly ā or e	לאה Lē'ā
ו	Waw	ō or ū	יואל Yō'ēl ברוך Bārūkh
י	Yod	ī, ē or ǣ	דויד Dāwīd

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.

Historically, the practice of using matres lectionis seems to have originated when [ay] and [aw] diphthongs (written using the Yod י and Waw 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 latter 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 Waw 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 (he, waw, yod; 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.de:Matres lectionis fr:Mater lectionis he:אם קריאה ru:Матрес лекционис