Reading the squiggles

Of course, your own language doesn't look like squiggles (well, maybe some people's handwriting might), but it's certainly hard learning another language and another alphabet at the same time. In Papua New Guinea and in the Philippines, they mostly use the standard Roman alphabet, so learning to read and write a new script at the same time as learning to speak is a first for me.


I have learnt to read the square letters and even the standard cursive font, although I can only read it much slower. But handwriting -- that's another story. If it's really neat, I can slowly work through the letters to figure out what they are (once I put on my reading glasses and figure out which way is the right way up -- and that's not always obvious to me at first glance), but hurried handwriting might as well be in Arabic or something. Even fancy stylish script on things like the name on a can of Coca Cola takes extra work to read (although of course it's easier if it's something like that where you already know pretty much what it's going to say).

And something that really surprised me was concerning the vowels. I knew that the locals don't normally write the vowels -- only the consonants in each word. But I assumed (wrongly) that they always know what the correct vowels are -- well they do know how to pronounce the words, but as the Hebrew language has developed over the millenia, there are some vowel points which are different from each other but pronounced pretty much the same. A final-year high-school student I asked, had to check in a dictionary to check which vowels exactly should be written for the word. (Vowels are written mostly below, but also above and inside the consonant letters. The Hebrew Scriptures, books for very small children, and dictionaries have the vowels written in -- virtually nothing else does.) Bt t lst thr r n cptl lttrs t wrry bt!

Hebrew writing

It takes a little while to get used to picking up books and opening them from the "back" so you don't look silly always opening books at the end instead of the beginning.

The only time I've seen vowels written has been in books for little children and in the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible. Everything else, including all books and newspapers and signs only have the consonants written.


I had never really thought about it with English, but of course as well as printed letters, we have cursive letters, and not only that, we also have many fonts such as serif and sans serif fonts and fancy display fonts. Well, Hebrew has the same. So although I have done most of my learning with the normal printed letters, and even though I spent some time also practising reading cursive letters, I struggle with even recognizing the letters in many logos and decorative signs, even on groceries. On the plane, I was studying the label on the butter (all Kosher), and stared for ages at one letter in the word -- not able to figure it out. Finally I had to ask the hostess what this particular letter was because I had never seen it written in a font like that!

But it was nice when I joined a Sabbath evening service with a Messianic congregation to be able to understand many of the songs on the overhead (without vowels). Of course, I have learnt words like God and righteous and truth and sing, so in that context of Christian songs I was able to figure out much of the meaning even though I couldn't quite read the script fast enough to sing until about the third time through each chorus.