Hebrew Voices #141 – When were the Hebrew Vowels Written Down

British “aluminium” pronunciation is actually a mispronunciation and does not match the universal spelling. A better example might be “naught” sometimes spoken as “not” and sometimes like “nowt” depending on dialect.

It has long been my theory that the different vowel pointing systems could easily reflect a different accent/pronunciation of words, for instance, as the word “Aluminum” is spoken by an American as compared to a typical British pronunciation of the same word. The Naphtali system may even have represented a Galilean accent, as the Gospel of John records Peter’s speech gave him away as being a Galilean. The Naphtali system was simply abandoned as an overwhelming number of “Tiberian” speakers prevailed.

Sorry i should have proof read that better,, a few mistakes…also should be Torah, not Tenach 🙂 one of my points was the pictographic Hebrew (as far as i know) was never used with vowel pointings 🙂

I am no kind of scholar, but it seems to me .. if the Hebrews were writing pictographic letters in the wilderness with no vowels, then there is a good chance Moses likely recorded the tenach is the the same pictographic letters. what i understood is that the Hebrew letters we use today were influenced by the Aramaic letters… and the vowels came after that. I know secularly the ancient peoples and certainly all “common” peoples were thought to be illiterate and less intelligent than the peoples of today. But anyone who reads the bible even at face value should see a very intelligent people from the beginning. I see no reason why YHVH would not have given Adam a complete language day 1. Certainly if you were to read the the other biblical traditions preflood peoples were very scholarly… writing and passing on writings, that other folks, average folks, could read. And then at the tower of Babel YHVH again stepped in to tweak language, “by family”, into presumably 70 differing languages why would they not be complete languages with Alpha-numerics?

Thank you so much for this! It was excellent, and I can’t wait to read his book. ~Anne Elliott