Hebrew spelling its context. Also, some words are almost always written in the "missing" form ("ktiv haser") in everyday life: לא (, no), אמא (, mother), אם (, if), and כנרת (, Kinneret). Hebrew spelling Hebrew spelling ( , "Hebrew spelling") refers to the way words are spelled in the Hebrew language. The Hebrew alphabet contains 22 letters, all of which are primarily consonants. This is because the Hebrew script is an abjad, that is, its letters indicate consonants, not vowels or syllables. An early system to overcome this, still used today, is "matres lectionis", where four of these letters, alef, he,
History of the Hebrew alphabet but following the rise of Christianity (and later, the rise of Islam), they gave way to the Latin and Arabic scripts, respectively. The Hebrew alphabet was later adapted in order to write down the languages of the Jewish diaspora (Karaim, Judæo-Arabic, Ladino, Yiddish, etc.), and was retained all the while in relatively unadapted form throughout the diaspora for Hebrew, which remained the language of Jewish law, scriptures and scholarship. The Hebrew alphabet was also retained as the alphabet used for writing down the Hebrew language during its rebirth as an everyday modern language starting in the 18th to 19th century.