The Hebrew Phonology-Orthography Interface

Abstract

This chapter gives the facts regarding the voweled and the non-voweled versions Hebrew orthography. It presents a historical and a current psycholinguistic review of a major phenomenon characterizing reading and spelling Hebrew – the under-representation of vowels, including the introduction of the nikud diacritic voweling system, and the transformation of four letters AHWY אהוי into matres lectiones – ‘mothers of reading’. This presentation is followed by an analysis of the sources of Hebrew spelling errors in two categories of changes: the expansion of the orthographic system through the introduction of graphemes or change in their functions to accommodate the new phonological distinctions, resulting in under-specified or homographic written representations; and the extensive neutralizations of previously distinct phonemes that have rendered Modern Hebrew phonology very different from its classical counterparts, resulting in loss of historical phonological distinctions which the orthography continues to mark by separate letters. When phonological distinctions are no longer directly encoded in the orthography, homophony is entailed: a single phoneme can be spelled by more than one grapheme.