Mater lectionis
Matres lectionis are consonants that are used to indicate a vowel, primarily in the writing down of Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac. The letters that do this in Hebrew are aleph, he, waw and yod, and in Arabic, the matres lectionis are ʾalif, wāw and yāʾ. The 'yod and waw in particular are more often vowels than they are consonants.
The original value of the matres lectionis correspond closely to what is called in modern linguistics glides or semivowels.
Overview
Because the scripts used to write some Semitic languages lack vowel letters, unambiguous reading of a text might be difficult. Therefore, to indicate vowels, consonant letters are used. For example, in the Hebrew construct-state form bēt, meaning "the house of", the middle letter י in the spelling בית acts as a vowel, but in the corresponding absolute-state form bayit, which is spelled the same, the same letter represents a genuine consonant. Matres lectionis are extensively employed only in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and Arabic, but the phenomenon is also found in the Ugaritic, Moabite, South Arabian and Phoenician alphabets.Origins and development
Historically, the practice of using matres lectionis seems to have originated when and diphthongs, written with the yod and the waw consonant letters respectively, monophthongized to simple long vowels and. This epiphenomenal association between consonant letters and vowel sounds was then seized upon and used in words without historic diphthongs.In general terms, it is observable that early Phoenician texts have very few matres lectionis, and that during most of the 1st millennium BCE, Hebrew and Aramaic were quicker to develop matres lectionis than Phoenician. However, in its latest period of development in North Africa, Phoenician developed a very full use of matres lectionis, including the use of the letter ayin, also used for this purpose much later in Yiddish orthography.
In pre-exilic Hebrew, there was a significant development of the use of the letter he to indicate word final vowels other than ī and ū. This was probably inspired by the phonological change of the third-person singular possessive suffix from > > in most environments. However, in later periods of Hebrew, the orthography was changed so word-final ō was no longer written with, except in a few archaically-spelled proper names, such as Solomon and Shiloh. The difference between the spelling of the third-person singular possessive suffix with in early Hebrew versus with in later Hebrew has become an issue in the authentication of the Jehoash Inscription.
According to Sass, already in the Middle Kingdom there were some cases of matres lectionis, i.e. consonant graphemes which were used to transcribe vowels in foreign words, namely in Punic, Aramaic, and Hebrew. Naveh notes that the earliest Aramaic and Hebrew documents already used matres lectionis. Some scholars argue that the Greeks must therefore have borrowed their alphabet from the Arameans. However, the practice has older roots, as the Semitic cuneiform alphabet of Ugarit already had matres lectionis.
Hebrew
The earliest method of indicating some vowels in Hebrew writing was to use the consonant letters yod, waw, he,and aleph of the Hebrew alphabet to also write long vowels in some cases. Originally, and were only used as matres lectiones at the end of words, and and were used mainly to write the original diphthongs and as well as original vowel++vowel sequences. Gradually, as it was found to be insufficient for differentiating between similar nouns, and were also inserted to mark some long vowels of non-diphthongal origin.If words can be written with or without matres lectionis, spellings that include the letters are called malē or plene, meaning "full", and spellings without them are called ḥaser or defective. In some verb forms, matres lectionis are almost always used. Around the 9th century CE, it was decided that the system of matres lectionis did not suffice to indicate the vowels precisely enough for purposes of liturgical recitation of Biblical texts so a supplemental vowel pointing system joined matres lectionis as part of the Hebrew writing system.
In some words in Hebrew, there is a choice of whether to use a mater lectionis or not, and in modern printed texts matres lectionis are sometimes used even for short vowels, which is considered to be grammatically incorrect according to traditional norms, though instances are found as far back as Talmudic times. Such texts from Judaea and Galilee were noticeably more inclined to malē spellings than texts from Babylonia. Similarly, in the Middle Ages, Ashkenazi Jews tended to use malē spellings under the influence of European languages, but Sephardi Jews tended to use ḥaser spellings under the influence of Arabic.
Arabic
In Arabic there is no such choice, and the almost invariable rule is that a long vowel is written with a mater lectionis and a short vowel with a diacritic symbol, but the Uthmanic orthography, the one in which the Quran is traditionally written and printed, has some differences, which are not always consistent. Also, under influence from orthography of European languages, transliterating of borrowed words into Arabic is usually done using matres lectionis in place of diacritics, even when the latter is more suitable or when words from another Semitic language, such as Hebrew, are transliterated. That phenomenon is augmented by the neglect of diacritics in most printed forms since the beginning of mechanical printing.The name given to the three matres lectionis by traditional Arabic grammar is ḥurūf al-līn wa-l-madd, ‘consonants of softness and lengthening’, or ḥurūf al-ʿilal, ‘causal consonants‘ or ‘consonants of infirmity’, because as in Greek grammar, words with ‘accidents’ were deemed to be afflicted, ill, in opposition to ‘healthy’ words without accidents.
Informal orthographies of spoken varieties of Arabic also use ha to indicate a shorter version of alif, a usage augmented by the ambiguity of the use of and taa marbuta in formal Arabic orthography. It is a formal orthography in other languages that use Arabic script, such as Kurdish alphabets.
Syriac
Syriac-Aramaic vowels are classified into three groups: the alap, the waw, and the yod. The mater lectionis was developed as early as the 6th century to represent long vowels, which were earlier denoted by a dot under the line. The most frequent ones are the yod and the waw, while the alap is mostly restricted to some transliterated words.Usage in Hebrew
Most commonly, yod indicates i or e, while waw indicates o or u. Aleph was not systematically developed as a mater lectionis in Hebrew, but it is occasionally used to indicate an a vowel. At the end of a word, he can also be used to indicate that a vowel a should be pronounced.Examples: