2718: Hebrew’s Vowels: The "Mater Lectionis" in Semitic Languages May 30, 2024

There is a term, mater lectionis, which is a Latin calque of a Hebrew term אם קריאה (em kria) meaning “mother of reading”, used to describe consonants being used to represent vowels. This is not something that really happens outside of Semitic languages, due to their use of abjads, instead of alphabets, that never represent vowels in the letters. This is different to using those letters to transliterate from other languages.

In Hebrew, this happens with the letters aleph א‎, hei ה‎, vav ו‎ and yod י‎, where already ו and י more often represent a vowel than a consonant. This will most commonly happen at the end of a word, though there are exceptions in both ways. For instance, a yod י at the beginning of a word sounds like [j] as in ירושלים (yerushalayim) meaning ‘Jerusalem’, where both yods י still keep their consonantal properties, but in the word ירושלמי (yerushalmi) i.e. “Jerusalemite” the yod י at the end only acts like a vowel [i], not [ji] (i.e. “ee”, not “yee”). In fact, these letters are not randomly associated with vowels; when they lose their consonant-ness, vav ו‎ goes from [v] to either [o] or [u], yod י‎ becomes [i], and hei ה‎ becomes [a] or [e] usually, though in some names of people or places it remains as [o], like ‘Shiloh’ שלה. In the case of aleph א it is these days treated as a mater lectionis, but as a consonant it represents a glottal stop, like in שאל (sha’al), and is not actually silent as many people claim.