10th January 2007
When I am teaching about the Hebrew Bible, the fact that Hebrew was originally unpointed often comes up. And at that point I will provide some sort of example with English, such as the title to this post: HBRW WTHT VWLS.
Well, Mississippi Fred MacDowell (that’s a great name!) over at English Hebraica has an interesting post entitled, “Ravens and Arabians: Hebrew with and without points in English,” in which he provides an example where the English and Hebrew actually coincide; here’s an excerpt:
This interesting book, The Parchments of the Faith by George Edmands Merrill published in 1894 by the American Baptist Publication Society, does the best job I’ve ever seen of it because it combined words in English as they would be in Hebrew (“and the ravens” are three words in English, but just one, ×•×”×?×¨×‘×™×?, in Hebrew–”nd th rvns” less accurately shows what Hebrew is like than “ndthrvns”). In addition, the vowel letters are formatted the way nekkudot are, dotting the consonants.
This is a great example; take a gander at it.