Modern Israeli Hebrew

Letters

Combining marks

Punctuation

Symbols

Other

Notes on phonology

Modern Israeli Hebrew was born from speakers who brought their own accents and pronunciations from different parts of the world. There are still variations in pronunciation, but two main types predominate today: Oriental and Occidental. Oriental Hebrew was chosen as the preferred accent for Israel by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, but has since declined in popularity. Age is often a factor in individual pronunciation.wp

In particular, there are alternative pronunciations for x~ħ, ʁ~r, ʔ~ʕ. In this document we use the left-hand side of each of these pairings.

Younger speakers also tend to make all consonants in a cluster voiced or unvoiced, depending on the last consonant, eg. לִסְגֹּר lisᵊgoˑʁ lis'ɡoʁ to close becomes liz'ɡoʁ, and אַבְטָחָה ʔavᵊtāxāh avta'xa security becomes afta'xa.

For more details, see: Wikipedia.

Vowel sounds

See also the phonology_notes.

Consonant sounds

	labial	alveolar	post- alveolar	palatal	velar	uvular	glottal
stop	p b	t d			k ɡ		ʔ
affricate		t͡s	t͡ʃ d͡ʒ
fricative	f v	s z	ʃ ʒ		x	ʁ	h
nasal	m	n
approximant	w	l		j
trill/flap		r ɾ

x is sometimes described as χ, and ʁ as r. For more variants see phonology_notes.

Final -h is rarely pronounced in modern Hebrew.wp,#Loss_of_final_H_consonant

Tone

Hebrew is not a tonal language.

Structure

tbd

Hebrew spelling

Wikipedia describes 3 main types of spelling found in contemporary Israeli text.

כתיב חסר Ktiv haser (missing spelling) uses no niqqud or additional matres lectionis. It looks anachronistic and can be ambiguous but can still be found sometimes in newspapers and published books.

אמץ

אויר

חלקה

כתיב מנוקד Ktiv menuqad (pointed spelling), rarely used in everyday life because it is too cumbersome, shows all the vowels using the niqqud points. It is used wherever the pronunciation needs to be clear and unambiguous, such as in children's books, poetry, language instruction for newcomers, or ambiguous or foreign terms.

אֹמֶץ

אֲוִיר

חֲלֻקָּה

כתיב מלא Ktiv male (full spelling) or ktiv hasar niqqud is the predominant approach, including in personal correspondence, movies subtitles, etc. It adds matres lectionis to words where certain niqqud points would occur in the pointed spelling approach. To avoid confusion, consonantal ו v and י j are doubled in the middle of words.

אומץ

אוויר

חלוקה

More vowel details

Hebrew is normally unvocalised (ie. the vowel diacritics are hidden). In this case, vowels are written using a small number of matres lectionis (consonants marking vowel locations), and some vowels are not marked at all. fig_novowel_grid shows ways of writing Hebrew vowels in unvocalised text. For each letter there are 3 lines, indicating initial, medial, and final forms. In 3 places no vowel is marked at all.

In vocalised text Hebrew uses a mixture of matres lectionis and combining diacritics to represent vowels. fig_vowel_grid shows ways of writing Hebrew vowels in vocalised text.

Vowel basics

Niqqud points

A series of points, known as niqqud, can be used to give precision about vowel sounds. They are rarely used outside of educational, children's, and religious texts, or for foreign or ambiguous words.

show composition

אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי

The Modern Israeli Hebrew orthography we are discussing here uses the following niqqud to represent vowel sounds.

ִ␣ֻ␣ֵ␣ֶ␣ֱ␣ֹ␣ֳ␣ְ␣ָ␣ַ␣ֲ

Redundancy arises because the modern orthography retains alternative points that in the past expressed length differences, whereas modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation ignores phonetic length.

Three of the above code points have glyphs that combine the glyph for 05B0 (sh'va) with that of another point. These combinations were used in older Hebrew to indicate particularly short vowel lengths, and the spelling has been retained in modern Hebrew. The Unicode Standard recommends that you use a single, precomposed Unicode code point for each of these combinations. These precomposed characters don't decompose during normalisation.

ׇ␣ֺ

The two code points just above may be used, mostly in biblical texts or prayer books, to preserve fine typographic differences in usage. For more information, click on the characters.

Standalone vowels

In theory, Hebrew doesn't have any true standalone vowels, since vowels are always preceded by a consonant. However, when that consonant is a glottal stop, the stop is often dropped and in spoken Hebrew a vowel then occurs at the beginning of a word or word-medially after another vowel.

These vowels are always written with a base consonant, which is usually one of 05D0 or 05E2. The alef is by far the most common when word initial.

אֵזוֹר

אוֹתְיוֹם

עֵץ

עוֹלָם

בעיה

גַּבְרִיאֵל

Vowel absence

In pointed text, 05B0 may be used to express an absence of vowel between two consonants. However, in various contexts the sh'va may indicate that the consonant is followed by a short, epenthetic vowel e.

אגרוף

בהמות

A word-final consonant typically doesn't take a diacritic. (See finals.)

אַנְגְּלִית

בָּחוּר

Vowel sounds to characters

Basic consonants

These are the basic consonant letters used in modern Hebrew.

Repertoire extensions

Methods used to modify the sound of a consonant. See also cantillation.

Onsets

Consonant clusters in syllable onsets are simply written using a sequence of consonant letters in full spelling text, and apply 05B0 in pointed text.

ברכה

גבול

Finals

Five letters have special word-final forms, called sofit. They are encoded as separate code points in Unicode, and appear as separate keys on a keyboard, so no special processing is needed to display or store them (unlike Arabic).

Foreign words and names may sometimes use the normal forms at the end of a word, rather than the sofit form. In those cases, use the non-final code points.

Consonants that are not followed by a vowel are normally written with 05B0 in pointed text, but not when they are word-final.

בִּגְלַל

אֶגְזוֹז

אָקוֹרְד

Observation: One exception appears to be ךְ.

בֶּרֶךְ

רַךְ

Consonant clusters

As with onsets, consonant clusters are simply written using a sequence of consonant letters in full spelling text, and are marked by 05B0 in pointed text. The offglide of a diphthong is written in the same way.

גמבה

בייגל

Consonant length

From Wikipedia: gemination is not adhered to in modern Hebrew and is only used in careful pronunciation, such as reading of scriptures in a synagogue service, recitations of biblical or traditional texts or on ceremonious occasions, and then only by very precise readers.

In pre-Modern Hebrew, gemination was indicated using 05BC.

Consonant sounds to characters

Cantillation & other marks

Formatting characters

Hebrew text makes use of a set of invisible formatting characters, especially in plain text, most of which are used to manage text direction. Descriptions of these characters can be found in the following section:

• directioncontrols

Currency

The denomination is generally expressed by the following abbreviationwhp, which stands for שקל חדש:

ש״ח

20AA may also be used. It is displayed to the left of the amount, with no separation or with a thin space, eg.

₪12,000

Observation: Wikipedia says that this requires the sheqel sign to be typed after the amount, however, the opposite is the case for all major browsers.whp

Managing text direction

Unicode provides a set of 10 formatting characters that can be used to control the direction of text when displayed. These characters have no visual form in the rendered text, however text editing applications may have a way to show their location.

202B (RLE), 202A (LRE), and 202C (PDF) are in widespread use to set the base direction for an inline range of characters. RLE/LRE come at the start, and PDF at the end of a range of characters for which the base direction is to be set.

More recently, the Unicode Standard added a set of characters which do the same thing but also isolate the content from surrounding characters, in order to avoid spillover effects. They are 2067 (RLI), 2066 (LRI), and 2069 (PDI). The Unicode Standard recommends that these be used instead.

There is also 2068 (FSI), used initially to set the base direction according to the first recognised strongly-directional character.

200F (RLM) and 200E (LRM) are invisible characters with strong directional properties that are also sometimes used to produce the correct ordering of text.

For more information about how to use these formatting characters see How to use Unicode controls for bidi text. Note, however, that when writing HTML you should generally use markup rather than these control codes. For information about that, see Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts.

Expressions & sequences

A sequence of numbers, for example a range separated by hyphens, generally runs left to right in Hebrew (unlike Arabic).

Font styles

Hebrew has a number of different writing styles.

The standard, 'square script' is derived from Aramaic. There are serif and sans-serif fonts.

The STAM style is used for sacred texts such as the Torah. Certain letters have decorative tags above.s

The rashi style is used for commentaries on sacred texts. Letters have a more rounded, almost cursive style.s

Hebrew also has a 'cursive' style, which means 'handwriting' style. Letters are not normally joined. Cursive fonts are only used as display fonts. Many glyphs look very different from the standard letter forms.

Before the Babylonian exile (from which the square script derives), Hebrew was written with different shapes, which are similar to those used for Samaritan.

Context-based shaping & positioning

In Hebrew several characters have a different shape at the end of a word, but each shape variant has it's own code point and keyboard key, so there is no need for rendering rules to choose the correct glyph.

This example shows מ and ם (on the left).

Multiple diacritics for one base character are common where the various types of diacritic are mixed.

Combinations of 05B0 with other vowel diacritics are represented by single, non-decomposable code points, eg. 05B1.

In NFC normalised text, a dagesh or shin/sin dot always follows the vowel diacritic. It may be necessary to reorder the diacritics for some applications, eg. for transcriptions that map a consonant+dagesh to a single letter.

The diacritic 05B9 illustrates how positioning can be context-sensitive. fig_holam shows 3 examples.

Letterform slopes, weights, & italics

Bold text is used as one way to highlight or emphasise text. The degree of bolding is often quite light. Bold-italic is typically only used for large display text.l

Italics may also be used, however its use is not abundant, and many of the italic faces in fonts are designed for display use, rather than to accompany a regular font.l

There are different preferences for the direction of the slant for italicised Hebrew text. The choice as to which is preferred appears to be down to the individual, and is a question of whether the slant matches the direction of the Hebrew text, or embedded Latin text.l

Word boundaries

Words are separated by spaces.

Hyphens.05BE is the proper punctuation for representing hyphens between compounds,wc.

תל־אביב

However, it is less common online because it is not always easily available on keyboards. Therefore, - U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS is often substituted, even though the position of that character is too low when displayed.wc

The Unicode Standard indicates that lines should not break on either side of the maqaf.g

Graphemes

Phrase & section boundaries

Hebrew uses ASCII punctuation for the most part. Full stops, question marks, exclamation marks, and commas are used as in English. There are 6 additional punctuation characters in the Hebrew Unicode block.

Note that the direction of the question mark (?) is the same as in English, and not reversed like for Arabic. The same is true for the comma ( , ).

Biblical & liturgical usage. ׀ is used as a word separator.wc

Prayer books and similar use ׃ as a full stop.wc

Quotations & citations

Hebrew texts use quotation marks around quotations. Note, however, that these are not paired. Of course, due to keyboard design, quotations may also be surrounded by ASCII double and single quote marks.

In principle, for modern quotations, 201D is used at the start and at the end.

”ישראל” Israel

Nested quotations use different quote marks, which would typically be 2019.a,#target-4931

However, in practice, Hebrew texts often use " U+0022 QUOTATION MARK and ' U+0027 APOSTROPHE.

Up to around 1970 Hebrew used 201E instead for the initial quotation mark, ie. „ישראל”but this changed, partly due to inadequate keyboard designs.whp,#Quotation_marks

Emphasis

Increased tracking is a common way to express emphasis in Hebrew.

Aternatives include the use of a different typeface, and/or underlining.l

Abbreviation, ellipsis & repetition

Acronyms and abbreviations are indicated by placing 05F4 before the last character.

אונסכ״ו

סופ״ש

05F3 may also be used to indicate an abbreviation,wg eg. גברת is abbreviated as גב׳

Due to keyboard inadequacies, these are often replaced by ASCII single and double quote characters, even though in general they are visually too high. 

Line breaking & hyphenation

Lines are normally broken at word boundaries.

Breaking between Latin words

When a line break occurs in the middle of an embedded left-to-right sequence, the items in that sequence need to be rearranged visually so that it isn't necessary to read lines from top to bottom.

latin-line-breaks shows how two Latin words are apparently reordered in the flow of text to accommodate this rule. Of course, the rearragement is only that of the visual glyphs: nothing affects the order of the characters in memory.

Text spacing

Increased tracking is a common way to express emphasis in Hebrew.

Baselines, line height, etc.

Hebrew uses the so-called 'alphabetic' baseline, which is the same as for Latin and many other scripts.

The Hebrew characters are commonly slightly taller than the Latin x-height. fig_baselines shows ascenders and descenders for Hebrew letters in the Noto Serif fonts. In this font combination the maximum height of the Hebrew letters reaches slightly higher than the Latin extenders.

Counters, lists, etc.

You can experiment with counter styles using the Counter styles converter. Patterns for using these styles in CSS can be found in Ready-made Counter Styles, and we use the names of those patterns here to refer to the various styles.

The Hebrew orthography uses an additive style, in addition to numeric decimal style based on ASCII digits.

Styling initials

It is possible to find the first letter in a paragraph styled so that it is larger and sits alongside several lines of the continuing paragraph text.

Observation: The glyph in fig_drop_cap rises above the normal top line of most Hebrew characters. It also rises above the top line of the adjacent glyphs when positioned alongside them. The bottom of the glyph is aligned with the bottom of the glyphs on the 3rd line down.

Boxed initials can also be found, such as the one in fig_drop_cap_box. Here, the initial letter is centred horizontally and vertically inside the space created by the box. The box extends from the top line of the first line of text to the baseline of the 6th line.

General page layout & progression

Hebrew books, magazines, etc., are bound on the right-hand side, and pages progress from right to left.

Columns are vertical but run right-to-left across the page.