1903: Why Cherubs are Mistakenly Painted Like Children Mar 1, 2020

Cherubs are angelic beings, and in art they often depicted as childlike, but in the Bible they are described as having 4 heads, that of an eagle, an ox, a lion, and a man, and 4 wings—one set pointing up, and the other covering the body—each one with hands at the end, and humanoid legs with bronze-looking calf-hooves. Full descriptions can be found in the books of Ezekiel and Daniel, with mentions in many other places throughout the Bible. The difference between the artistic depictions is due entirely to rabbinic folk etymology, mistakenly relating the Hebrew כְּרוּב‎ (keruv) to the Aramaic kĕ-raḇyā meaning 'like a child'. For an alternate term to describe these childlike creatures, it is more accurate to say 'putto', since the iconography actually comes from Greek and Roman mythology.

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1842: Redundancy of כ/ך in Hebrew Dec 31, 2019

Along with the actually redundant letters, Hebrew has a few—like in English—which become redundant in certain contexts. For instance, כ, which also appears as ך at the ends of word can be just a plain [k]. However, it appears a [x]—like the Scottish 'loch'—after any vowel. In this way, the sound is not entirely redundant, but there are two other letters that represent those sounds respectively and exclusively, namely ק and ח. This is not unlike the situation with C, which could be replaced by either S or K in most situations, but also can be affected, sort of, morphologically, such as 'fanatiC' to 'fanatiCism'.

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1841: Emphatic צ in Ancient Hebrew Dec 30, 2019

As with ט and ת, there are some ways that Hebrew writing has become somewhat obsolete. In another case, though less extreme, the letter צ (pronounced 'ts', like the German 'z') used to be emphatic, such that it was aspirated differently (obstructed) before certain other sounds (more details here), such that it would be pronounced like an S, sort of, namely [s^ʕ]. However, there are already two letters that represent [s] without such obstruance, that is, ס and ש. Unlike with ט and ת for [t] however, this differentiation still exists, just without any pharyngealization (think: vocal fry) found in ancient Hebrew. More on the transformation of Hebrew letters tomorrow.

1840: Emphatic ט in Ancient Hebrew Dec 29, 2019

Hebrew orthography has 3 letters that represent silence, sort of, as well as two ways to represent [t], and two ways to represent [s]. However, this was not always so redundant. Of the two ways to represent the sound [t] in Modern Hebrew ט and ת, both have changed over time, but ט has changed more minimally. This letter used to be emphatic, meaning the air was immediately blocked after making the sound. This feature was lost to time however, due to influences from Indo-European languages, just like with Maltese. More on this tomorrow

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1631: dreidl Jun 2, 2019

Following yesterday's post about the folk-etymology surrounding dreidls, if someone needed further evidence that they're not of Semitic origin, it would be as easy as going to ask a child. 'Dreidl' (דרײדל‎) comes from 'dreien' meaning 'to turn', like the German 'drehen', but in Hebrew the word is 'sevivon' (סביבון), and this was invented by the 5 year-old son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who had invented Modern Hebrew. It is based from the Semitic root meaning 'to turn', but at the time, another word from Hayyim Nahman Bialik, "kirkar", was in use, based on the root for "to spin" but this did not catch on in spoken Hebrew. Many other words were used in Yiddish dialects too, based on Germanic or Slavic words.

1268: Irregular Spelling: Yiddish May 31, 2018

There are a lot of reasons why english spelling is so irregular, but one of them is that historically some words were adopted in (more or less) their original forms but not pronounced the same as in the native language. This happens still, especially with place-names. Nevertheless, English is by no means the only language to do so. While some languages such as Finnish borrows a lot of new words from English, the spelling always changes to fit the orthography, in other cases, such as Hebrew loan-words in Yiddish they retain their original spelling. In fact, because of this, the letter ת (taw) in Hebrew is usually pronounced as [t] but in Yiddish its an [s] among other differences, such as אמת (true) pronounced 'emet' in Hebrew but 'emes' in Yiddish. This is also a problem for reading Yiddish, because while Yiddish always represents vowels, Hebrew does not often.

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1223: Why the Abjad Works for Hebrew Apr 15, 2018

While theoretically any alphabet can be used to represent any language, given that there is some arbitrarity to all of them, some are more fitting for certain languages than others. For instance, the Assyrian alphabet used to write Hebrew (and Yiddish) primarily is an abjad meaning that vowels are not written in, at least necessarily. However, this does not mean than English words cannot be written in with this system, such as
איי לייק ביג באטס אנד איי חנות לי
graffitied on a wall in Israel reading a transliterated—not translated—"I like big butts and I cannot lie". However, the reason that an abjad is especially fitting for Hebrew is that while it has 9 vowels (five short; four long) any unstressed short vowel becomes the centralized schwa /ə/. This is in contrast to Yiddish where—like in the very similar German—vocalization is more important, and this is reflected in the writing which uses Assyrian letters, but more fully uses the vowels: א,י,ע, and ו.
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1167: Writing Systems: An Overview Feb 18, 2018

There are many different writing systems from all over the world, used with varying frequency, but not all of these are alphabets. The most obvious example of this may be with pictographic and logographic writing systems (symbols that represent words but aren't images thereof), which aren't alphabets because little to no attempt needs to be made to convey the way that the word sounds. This is why Cantonese and Mandarin (are not mutually intelligible when spoken always, but are written in much the same way. However the list goes on, for instance with abjads, such as for Arabic, Hebrew, and also Tifinagh, Syriac, and ancient Phoenician for which consonants are represented, but not necessarily vowels; Greek and by extension Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are essentially Phoenician but written left-to-right and with the addition of vowels. There are also syllabaries—where a syllable is represented but not the individual sounds—such as for Cherokee or Katakana Japanese. Finally, there are abugidas, which represent consonant-vowel segments; this gives the vowel more prevalence than in an abjad, but not equal status to consonants, such as in an alphabet. Of course, some languages are more suited for certain writing-systems than others, which is why Inuit words look so long written in the Latin script, and but why the Cree abugida (used for some Inuit-Yupik languages) could not be used for Georgian, with its long consonant-clusters.

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