-
Recent Articles
- From Exodus to Exhortation: The Syntax of Divine Persistence
- Gathered for Judgment: Syntactic Accumulation in Joshua 7:24
- Flying into the Trap: Syntactic Irony in Proverbs 7:23
- Little by Little: Divine Delay and Wild Beasts
- “And the Fish Died and the Nile Stank”: A Hebrew Lesson from Egypt’s First Plague
- The Subtle Grammar of Possession in Biblical Hebrew
- Syntax and Strategy: Analyzing Poetic Combat Syntax in Judges 7:20
- Exceeding Might: When the Waters Conquered Syntax and Summit
- Sound and Fury: The Syntax and Strategy in Judges 7:18
- The Seductive Scents of Syntax: A Close Reading of Proverbs 7:17
- Too Righteous, Too Wise: The Binyanim of Overreach in Ecclesiastes 7:16
- “Two by Two, Breath of Life”: Pairing and Presence in the LXX Translation of Genesis 7:15
Categories
Archives
Tag Archives: matres lectionis
Mater Lectionis
The usage of certain consonants to indicate a vowel in the spelling of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac languages is called matres lectionis (Latin “mothers of reading”, singular form: mater lectionis, Hebrew: אֵם קְרִיאָה mother of reading). The letters that do this in Hebrew are א (aleph), ה (he), ו (waw) and י (yod). The י and ו in particular are more often vowels than they are consonants.
The practice of using matres lectionis seems to have originated when [ay] and [aw] diphthongs (written using the י (yod) and ו (waw) consonant letters respectively) monophthongized to simple long vowels [ē] and [ō].… Learn Hebrew