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,
Hebrew alphabet always represented by pe in its regular, not final, form "פ", even when in final word position, which occurs with loanwords (e.g. שׁוֹפּ ""shop""), foreign names (e.g. פִילִיפּ ""Philip"") and some slang (e.g. חָרַפּ ""slept deeply""). The letters of the Hebrew alphabet have played varied roles in Jewish religious literature over the centuries, primarily in mystical texts. Some sources in classical rabbinical literature seem to acknowledge the historical provenance of the currently used Hebrew alphabet and deal with them as a mundane subject (the Jerusalem Talmud, for example, records that "the Israelites took for themselves square calligraphy", and that the