Qamaṣ
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Qamaṣ
Kamatz or qamatz (, ; alternatively ) is a Hebrew niqqud (vowel) sign represented by two perpendicular lines (looking like an uppercase T) underneath a letter. In modern Hebrew, it usually indicates the phoneme which is the " a" sound in the word ''spa'' and is transliterated as ''a''. In these cases, its sound is identical to the sound of ' in modern Hebrew. In a minority of cases it indicates the phoneme , equal to the sound of '. In traditional Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation, qamatz is pronounced as the phoneme , which becomes in some contexts in southern Ashkenazi dialects. Qamatz Qaṭan, Qamatz Gadol, Ḥataf Qamatz Qamatz Qaṭan vs. Qamatz Gadol The Hebrew of the late centuries BCE and early centuries of the Common Era had a system with five phonemic long vowels and five short vowels . In the later dialects of the 1st millennium CE, phonemic vowel length disappeared, and instead was automatically determined by the context, with vowels pronounced long in open syl ...
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Niqqud
In Hebrew orthography, niqqud or nikud ( or ) is a system of diacritical signs used to represent vowels or distinguish between alternative pronunciations of letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Several such diacritical systems were developed in the Early Middle Ages. The most widespread system, and the only one still used to a significant degree today, was created by the Masoretes of Tiberias in the second half of the first millennium AD in the Land of Israel (see Masoretic Text, Tiberian Hebrew). Text written with niqqud is called '' ktiv menuqad''. Niqqud marks are small compared to the letters, so they can be added without retranscribing texts whose writers did not anticipate them. In modern Israeli orthography ''niqqud'' is mainly used in specialised texts such as dictionaries, poetry, or texts for children or new immigrants to Israel. For purposes of disambiguation, a system of spelling without niqqud, known in Hebrew as '' ktiv maleh'' (, literally "full spelling") had develope ...
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Tiberian Hebrew
Tiberian Hebrew is the canonical pronunciation of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) committed to writing by Masoretic scholars living in the Jewish community of Tiberias in ancient Galilee under the Abbasid Caliphate. They wrote in the form of Tiberian vocalization, which employed diacritics added to the Hebrew letters: vowel signs and consonant diacritics ( nequdot) and the so-called accents (two related systems of cantillation signs or ''te'amim''). These together with the marginal notes masora magna and masora parva make up the Tiberian apparatus. Although the written vowels and accents came into use in around 750 CE, the oral tradition that they reflect is many centuries older, with ancient roots. Sources Today's Hebrew grammar books do not teach the Tiberian Hebrew that was described by the early grammarians. The prevailing view is that of David Qimḥi's system of dividing the graphic signs into "short" and "long" vowels. The values assigned to the Tiberian vowel s ...
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Ashkenazi Hebrew
Ashkenazi Hebrew (, ) is the pronunciation system for Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew favored for Jewish liturgical use and Torah study by Ashkenazi Jewish practice. Features As it is used parallel with Modern Hebrew, its phonological differences are clearly recognized: * ''aleph'' and '' ayin'' are completely silent at all times in most forms of Ashkenazi Hebrew. In other dialects of Hebrew, they can be pronounced as a glottal stop. Compare ''Yisroeil'' (Lithuanian) or ''Yisruayl'' (Polish-Galician) vs. ''Yisra'el'' (Israeli). An earlier pronunciation of ''ayin'' as a velar nasal () is attested most prominently in Dutch Hebrew (and historically also the Hebrew of Frankfurt am Main). Vestiges of this earlier pronunciation are still found throughout the Yiddish-speaking world in names like ''Yankev'' (יעקבֿ) and words like ''manse'' (מעשׂה, more commonly pronounced ''mayse''), but are otherwise marginal. * ungeminated '' '' is pronounced in Ashkenazi Hebrew. It is always ...
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Shin Dot
Shin (also spelled Šin (') or Sheen) is the twenty-first and penultimate letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ''šīn'' 𐤔, Hebrew ''šīn'' , Aramaic ''šīn'' 𐡔, Syriac ''šīn'' ܫ, and Arabic ''sīn'' . The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Sigma () (which in turn gave rise to the Latin , the German '' ẞ'' and the Cyrillic С), and the letter '' Sha'' in the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts (, ). The South Arabian and Ethiopian letter '' Śawt'' is also cognate. The letter ''šīn'' is the only letter of the Arabic alphabet with three dots with a letter corresponding to a letter in the Northwest Semitic abjad or the Phoenician alphabet. Origins The Proto-Sinaitic glyph, according to William Albright, was based on a "tooth" and with the phonemic value š "corresponds etymologically (in part, at least) to original Semitic ''ṯ'' (th), which was pronounced ''s'' in South Canaanite". However, the Proto-Semitic word for "tooth" has been re ...
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Syllable
A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are most often consonants). In phonology and studies of languages, syllables are often considered the "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre; properties such as stress, tone and reduplication operate on syllables and their parts. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ''ignite'' is made of two syllables: ''ig'' and ''nite''. Most languages of the world use relatively simple syllable structures that often alternate between vowels and consonants. Despite being present in virtually all human languages, syllables still have no precise definition that is valid for all known languages. A common criterion for finding syllable bound ...
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Common Era
Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) are year notations for the Gregorian calendar (and its predecessor, the Julian calendar), the world's most widely used calendar era. Common Era and Before the Common Era are alternatives to the original Anno Domini (AD) and Before Christ (BC) notations used for the same calendar era. The two notation systems are numerically equivalent: " CE" and "AD " each describe the current year; "400 BCE" and "400 BC" are the same year. The expression can be traced back to 1615, when it first appears in a book by Johannes Kepler as the (), and to 1635 in English as " Vulgar Era". The term "Common Era" can be found in English as early as 1708, and became more widely used in the mid-19th century by Jewish religious scholars. Since the late 20th century, BCE and CE have become popular in academic and scientific publications on the grounds that BCE and CE are religiously neutral terms. They have been promoted as more sensitive to non-Christia ...
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Holam
Holam or cholam (modern , , formerly , ') is a Hebrew niqqud vowel sign represented by a dot above the upper left corner of the consonant letter. For example, here the holam appears after the letter '' mem'' ‎: . In modern Hebrew, it indicates the mid back rounded vowel, , and is transliterated as an ''o''. The ''mater lectionis'' letter which is usually employed with holam is vav, although in a few words, the letters ' or ' are used instead of '. When it is used with a ''mater lectionis'', the holam is called ''holam male'' (, , "full holam"), and without it the holam is called ''holam haser'' (, , "deficient holam"). Appearance If a holam is used without a following ''mater lectionis'' (vav, alef or he), as in (, "here"), it is written as a dot above at the upper-left corner of the letter after which it is pronounced. Letter-spacing is not supposed to be affected by it, although some buggy computer fonts may add an unneeded space before the next letter. If vav is us ...
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Phoneme
A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages contain phonemes (or the spatial-gestural equivalent in sign languages), and all spoken languages include both consonant and vowel phonemes; phonemes are primarily studied under the branch of linguistics known as phonology. Examples and notation The English words ''cell'' and ''set'' have the exact same sequence of sounds, except for being different in their final consonant sounds: thus, versus in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a writing system that can be used to represent phonemes. Since and alone distinguish certain words from others, they are each examples of phonemes of the English language. Specifically they are consonant phonemes, along with , while is a vowel phoneme. The spelling of Engli ...
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Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew (, or ), also known as Israeli Hebrew or simply Hebrew, is the Standard language, standard form of the Hebrew language spoken today. It is the only surviving Canaanite language, as well as one of the List of languages by first written account, oldest languages still spoken as a native language, native language, on account of Hebrew being attested since the 2nd millennium BC. It uses the Hebrew Alphabet, an Abjad, abjad script written from right-to-left. The current standard was Codification (linguistics), codified as part of the revival of Hebrew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and now serves as the Official language, sole official and national language of the State of Israel, where it is Languages of Israel, predominantly spoken by over 9 million people. Thus, Modern Hebrew is near universally regarded as the most successful instance of language revitalization in history. A Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic langu ...
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Uppercase
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''#Majuscule, majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally ''#Minuscule, minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper- and lowercase have two parallel sets of letters: each in the majuscule set has a counterpart in the minuscule set. Some counterpart letters have the same shape, and differ only in size (e.g. ), but for others the shapes are different (e.g., ). The two case variants are alternative representations of the same letter: they have the same name and pronunciation and are typically treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order. Letter case is generally applied in a mixed-case fashion, with both upper and lowercase letters appearing in a given piece of text for legibility. The choice of case is often denoted by the grammar of a language or by the conventions of a particular ...
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