Why English Needs Vowels

This series of web pages provides free lessons on the Hebrew Vowels. Previous lessons looked at the Hebrew Alphabet. If you want to learn Hebrew quickly, why not download our Hebrew Vowel Flashcards and get started within minutes?


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In previous lessons, we looked at the Hebrew Alphabet. The Hebrew letters are essentially consonants, although a few (emahot hakria – the mothers of reading) including Yod, Vav and Heh are sometimes used as vowels to make the pronunciation of some Hebrew words less ambiguous.

When we say Hebrew Vowels, we mean the dots and dashes that appear inside, below or above the Hebrew letters. These vowels are optional in Hebrew. This is completely different to English, where words are made up of letters which can be consonants or vowels. In English, by contrast, the vowels (a, e, i, o, u, oo, ee and so on) are scattered throughout the word. The vowels are an integral part of the word and the word can't be spelled without its vowels. The vowels look like any other letter in English.
Well, in Hebrew, things are different. Why? The answer is simple. Because of the way English works, English must have vowels. Hebrew, however, doesn’t really need vowels. Having vowels can make it easier to know how to pronounce a Hebrew word (especially for beginners) and vowels can also resolve some ambiguities, but Hebrew words don't need vowels. Vowels aren't used in Modern Hebrew books and newspapers, for instance.

Let’s consider what would happen if English didn’t have vowels. Take the consonants bt, for example. Without vowels, these letters could give any of the following words:

abet, bat, bait, abate, batty, bet, beat, bit, bite, bot, boot, boat, booty, but, butt

Or, as another example, the consonants br could give any of the following words:

bar, bare, Barry, bear, beer, bier, boar, bore, burr
The above sets of words have two things in common:
  • They all have the same consonants, the same ‘root’ letters.
  • They have nothing in common! That is, the words that can be formed from the same consonants are completely different. They have different meanings and different derivations, with no connection whatsoever between the words.
In English, therefore, you must have vowels in the word. Without them, you simply won’t understand what the word is supposed to be because there are so many potential ambiguities. This is a consequence of the way English works, and the fact that English is a mixture of several language roots such as Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic, French, German, Greek and Latin.
 
 

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