3 ms·
Hebrew has the ridiculous feature of changing the sounds of those three letter roots in a such a way that they sound like _completely_ different words to someon
by ipv6ipv4 4y ago
Hebrew has the ridiculous feature of changing the sounds of those three letter roots in a such a way that they sound like _completely_ different words to someone who is not already fluent - e.g. kaf and khaf, bet and vet.
The lack of vowels also trips up non-native speakers/readers.
- linux2647 4y agoI mean, that doesn’t sound too far off from what happens in Celtic languages like Welsh or Irish where the ending of one word mutates (softens) the beginning of the next word
- dhosek 4y agoThe lack of (written) vowels is less of an issue than most people think as the vowels tend to come in predictable patterns. Likewise the differences of pronunciation for ב, פ and כ are again predictable. It’s not unlike how in Czech, a consonant in a cluster takes on the voiced/unvoiced quality of the following consonant so that kde is pronounced as if it were written gde. I really think that Hebrew is the most beginner-friendly language of all the languages that I’ve learned.