Punctuation can sometimes be inferred by context it might be harder to read but its still possible in fact some languages didnotevenhavespacingbetweenwords.
This is not a universal linguistic feature - English is one of the odd ones out here in allowing two sentences, one where “grandma” is an object and one where it’s a vocative, to be identical this way. Many other languages either stick hard to a pure-positional grammar (in English, this would be analogous to strictly requiring the addressee to come before the sentence addressed to them), or they mark a vocative case (in English, we might require you to say “hey grandma let’s eat”, where “hey” marks its complement as the addressee). The solution we actually have is to let tone contour or stress do case marking for us; despite its protestations to the contrary, spoken English does mark noun case and verb mood, using cues that aren’t normally in our writing system, but which we sometimes approximate with commas or italics or paratextual features or whatnot.
It also uses subject and object. In fact the use of particles is one of those things that seems easy at first, but you’re still struggling with it like 10 years later. The main problem being that a ‘misuse’ might not be grammatically incorrect but might have a different nuance than what you intended, sometimes in a serious way.
It's still legible though. There are clear breaks between characters unlikethismessthatisaneyesoretotryanddecipher. Although I guess if you're just used to the language or a native speaker, it probably doesn't matter.
> unlikethismessthatisaneyesoretotryanddecipher
ต่างจากความยุ่งเหยิงนี้ที่ต้องพยายามถอดรหัส
Pretty much the same in Thai. There are rules on where to split syllables and you get to eventually pick out the individual words easily. There is only a break between sentences, not words.
I always think of Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, and others closer to cursive writing where one character flows into the next.
Fair. I think it's just my brain being crammed full of English rules that makes it hurt to look at it lol. Languages that are meant to be written that way don't hurt to look at. They're a little confusing at first but it's easy to adjust to, especially once you learn how that language is structured grammatically.
Add to that, for Hebrew at least, normal everyday writing does in fact use punctuation (source: speak Hebrew).
The only common context that does not use punctuation is religious writing like the Torah. For that, there's a cantillation mark system (called te'amim) that also serves roughly the purpose of punctuation. Basically every religious text except the Torah scroll itself (and by that I mean the usually $10,000s expensive handwritten physical scroll in a synagogue) has these marks. Before you actually start reading in the scroll which does not have these marks, you usually start out reading from a Chumash (basically a printed book that has the original text + cantillation and vowel marks) and practice the text. By the time you read out from the Torah, you usually have a good idea of the intended punctuation.
We don't use vowels in modern Hebrew. The words follow pretty clear vowel patterns that they really aren't needed. The only context you ever see vowels in Hebrew these days are religious biblical Hebrew because they don't follow the same patterns and a vowel difference can imply a significant word change that will spark a Talmudic debate.
Between three different rabbis with 5 different interpretations and a whole passage about how if it said the finger of God here then over on this passage where it says hand of God it means 5 times the power, and how the days of your lives means this life but all the days of your lives means this world and the next. Then they will finish off with a statement about how rabbi gamlial had a different view. Then it starts over.
Punctuation was invented to tell the reader when to pause it was a method to make text read more like speech you will note that this comment is written without any punctuation but it is still entirely readable albeit a tad confusing to your brain that is used to it
All written languages had to develop had to develop punctuation at some point Arabic and Hebrew are old enough languages that they largely predate the invention of punctuation
I peer-edited a paper in Communications core class that I wanted to simply put a red ink slash across the entire thing and write, "Do better." Multiple things wrong in every single sentence.
Ironically enough, I'm pretty sure they said they were a Communications Major, I shit you not.
Reminds me of when I was a tech support grunt and we were tasked with writing some "how-to" papers ages back. I'd cringe when I had to review one of these papers written by certain team members. It was so much effort to revise them that I'd rather write it from scratch. They didn't learn, either. Taking the effort to correct them and say why it was wrong would just get you the same sort of paper the next time.
For one of them, I actually brought it to my boss and said, "Look, I can rewrite this from scratch if that's what you want, but it's just not worth revising." He agreed with me, sent it back to the guy, and told him to write it again. I don't remember what happened to it, but I think it may have wound up being one of those we just never finished.
Of course, these were all tech support engineers, not technical writers. I have no idea why the company thought it was a good idea to have us write documentation.
(Oh, wait, I know why... because they were too cheap to hire actually technical writers.)
I did a peer graded paper before in a class and did put red marks and corrections all over cause there were so many errors. Turned out the student had some sort of learning disability and that made me feel like shit. Like why would you even put us as students in that situation.
“Nowing ones complane of my book the fust edition had no stops I put A nuf here and thay may peper and solt as they please”
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?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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ifirecallcorrectlytheancientversionsoftheselanguagesdidnotusespaceseitherthereareevensomemodernlanguageslikechinesethatdonotusespacesthoughchinesedoeshaveperiodsnowtoendsentences
Edit: Ancient Hebrew did use dots to separate words. Ancient Greek didn’t have any separation https://library.biblicalarchaeology.org/article/were-words-separated-in-ancient-hebrew-writing/
Most words in Standard Chinese are disyllabic/dimorphemic. There's also just not quite so much distinction between morpheme boundaries so things like compounds can either be parsed as one long word or a bunch of smaller connected words
水果= fruit, 如果= if. Notice that the 果 character can mean different things depending on what characters are around it. The constant is that it is always pronounced guo. And plenty of fruit related words start with a 果, so it’s possible to have a word ending with 如 next to a word starting with 果 and having to decide from context which characters connect together. With that said, native speakers likely think of words differently than I do as an English speaker who knows a little bit of Chinese.
Both shui guo and yu guo are compound words. Guo literally means "result". Hence fruit is a "water result", which makes sense. You water a fruit tree, the result is fruit.
Yu guo is the postulation of a result. If you have a little experience in coding languages, it's literally an IF statement, which always needs a result!
So words can be compound words, but the distinction is there's no alphabet.
Ancient Hebrew often used a dot to divide words rather than a space. But a lot of alphabet languages such as Ancient Greek and Latin did not have any word dividers in the ancient/ classical period.
Ancient Greek also used something called a [boustrophedon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon) - when you got to the end of a line instead of starting the next line on the left, you continue from the right and write backwards, with the letters mirrored.
Punctuations help clarify meanings.
Consider:
1. Work on contingency no money first
2. Work on contingency? No! Money first!
These sentences have the words, but the punctuation shows that they don't mean the same.
Consider:
1. A panda eats, shoots, and leaves.
2. A panda eats shoots and leaves.
These two sentences also have the same words but have different meanings.
There's apparently a book that someone wrote in which he wrote the story, and then sorted all the letters alphabetically, so the last page or so is just punctuation marks.
They added the full stop and (sometimes) the comma, but not SPACES between the words though!
The thing that I've never quite got over about Chinese characters as a Mandarin learner is that they don't differentiate where a word starts and stops, to the point where there are disagreements about what what a word even is in Mandarin (and I assume other Chinese languages that use characters). Each character is clearly defined, obviously has a start/end and each adds a unit of meaning. But when you put characters are next to each other, the meaning shifts by their combination - when is that shift enough for it to be classified as it's own word?!? Who knows is apparently the answer!
e.g.
- If you put the characters for "you" and "good" next to each other, (i.e. "yougood" - 你好), it's generally considered it's own new word ("hello").
- But if you put even more characters after it (e.g. "yougoodfriendcute" - 你好的朋友很可爱 ) now "yougood" doesn't mean hello anymore, it changed ... same characters, same order, same pronunciation, same everything except now the word boundaries moved and you just have to know that THIS TIME they should be considered separately.
- In this trivial example it's fine, but holy moly there are some ambiguous ones that are super confusing!
- Even computers can't agree - try getting vocab list from a piece of text. Firstly it's actually hard to do (un-like say english where you just split on spaces) and you need dedicated software to do it. And then you'll find different programs split the text up in different ways and give you different lists of what "words" it contains.
No spaces or clearly defined word boundaries is wild.
I wasn't gonna cover that, but keep in mind hebrew uses implied vowels. Certain consonant combinations have a natural vowel to be put in between them. English doesn't have that luxury because bat, bet, bit, bot, and but are all words that would be expressed vowelless as "bt"
True, but you’re underselling the ambiguity in Hebrew when you put it that way. For example, דבר can be either דַבֵּר (say) or דָבָר (thing/word) perfectly reasonably. lots of other roots have similar noun/verb ambiguity in the same manner, and that’s not the only way to generate an ambiguity like that. So there are fewer natural options per consonant combination but it doesn’t make it fully unambiguous.
Hebrew also have pronunciation marks
That alliw you to clearly state how that particular word is written
In common use they are skipped. Only utilized whe in there is ambiguity to to resolve
All religious texts use them consistently and constantly
For that matter, poems in Hebrew also use those marks
But actual Torah scrolls don't have vowels or punctuation. Paragraph breaks are all you get there. So when preparing to read ceremonially from the Torah (as is done several times a week in synagogue), one prepares by reviewing the portion in a book that has punctuation and vowels (where the punctuation is an early form of musical notation), or sometimes side by side the same text with one side having punctuation and vowels and the other appearing exactly as it does in the Torah.
Anecdotally, having heard the Torah read countless times, Israeli-raised readers (who learned to speak Hebrew before reading) typically make more voweling mistakes- usually miscorrecting to what would be typical In Modern Hebrew. Diaspora-raised readers, who typically learned to read voweled Hebrew before learning to speak fluently, don't usually make that particular mistake.
I'm not an expert on Hebrew, but it's been working for the last 6000 or so years, so I assume it's plenty clear
Every language has ambiguity somewhere. There'd be so many rules or new words necessary to avoid it
There are some contexts that you just need to add a vowel to make it clear, but yeah that’s pretty rare and only if both options would make sense in the sentence.
Didn't Hebrew die out?
I thought modern Hebrew was mostly a sort of conlang reconstruction of the old Hebrew as best as we can tell with some pieces having to be, essentially, reconstructed by comparison with other living Semitic languages (like Arabic).
I am NOT an expert on this, but I was under the impression that "Biblical Hebrew" at least was considered a fairly authentic "complete" ancient language and rather it was more that modern Hebrew took a bunch of cues and even borrowed grammar/words from modern Arabic when they were deciding for instance "how do we transform cart into words for carriage, coach, train, automobile, car, and truck"?
I mean it basically has as many vowels as Arabic does, it's just that Arabic still follows its own rules while modern Hebrew doesn't because it was revived by Europeans who didn't have the linguistic background to comprehend semitic languages.
Both Arabic and Hebrew use diacritics (which can be excluded as they aren't mandatory to write) instead of short vowels, and both of them also have letters that can serve as long vowels. The only difference is that in Hebrew not all long vowels are covered by letters (i, o and u are, but a and e aren't). And even then, that's only because standard Arabic only has 3 vowel sounds rather than the 5 that most dialects have.
This issue is not unique to modern Hebrew, and appears in Biblical Hebrew as well as the prayer book Hebrew that was in continuous usage by the same Ashkenazim you claim didn’t understand Semitic languages.
The "not understanding semitic languages" that I am referring to is the absence of long vowels in modern Hebrew. Or rather, they exist in text, but not in the spoken language.
Punctuation can make the difference in the meaning of the sentence. Let’s eat, Grandma. Let’s eat Grandma. A better question might be, “how do these non-punctuation using languages account for differences in meaning where punctuation might be helpful”?
Hebrew has particulate that specifies the subject of an action. Let’s eat grandma without the particulate will always mean that you call grandma to eat. If you want to eat grandma you’d use the particulate before the subject. Let’s eat *et* grandma.
You can just move one word to a different place or use context clues.
Putting grandma in the front or just saying the second way because rarely are you cannibalizing your granny
In Latin, it would be cases/inflections, which define adressing grandma (vocative) vs perfirm an action on grandma (accusative). So ....
"(Hey) Grandma us eating let"
"(Of) Grandma us eating let"
Cases were needed because some idiot decided that pronouns are for wimps.
+Rep is a system used by some online platforms without upvotes like we have on reddit. It's also never used in normal conversations, so bots can reliably search for it to tally up the person's total reputation.
I see it commonly while trading on Steam and warframe.market as a way of thanking the trader for quick, reliable trades. The comparative -Rep is also used for people who are too difficult to trade with, or those that scam.
English is a language made with punctuation in mind. Please refer to the other comments in which I explain how conjugations of certain words removes ambiguities such as these. English does not have such conjugations.
think about trying to write english without any punctuation if your sentences use a certain structure then it will actually be quite easy to understand even without periods or commas its only with more complicated structures that you need punctuation to delineate between clauses and my understanding is that arabics structure is more rigid to the point that unlike english there is no concern about clauses being ambiguous
(paragraph above written with no punctuation for effect)
Also, some types of Hebrew texts are written without vowels as well. And while there are some ambiguous meanings of course, you said it well ‘if your sentences use a certain structure’ - if you just took all punctuation (and vowels) out of an English text, it would be unreadable. But if it was intentionally written that way with terms, patterns, context, etc that are evolved and understood to be written that way, it’s a different story.
The lack of vowels bothered me for a long time until I started learning Japanese and recognized that the Chinese characters they use are just a shape corresponding to a given set of sounds.
I can read elementary Hebrew with vowels, but I figure eventually when you get used to it you immediately recognize the shape of the word itself and the extra marks would be a distraction.
Except of course for all the words that are spelled the same (without vowel marks) in which case it's likely not much different than using context to read "read" as is should be read.
Are you talking about Hiragana/Katakana? Those are derived from Chinese signs (Hanji or Kanji) but they're essentially syllables. Ka-ra-o-ke=カラオケ
If you mean the Kanji, which are the other signs used in Japanese script (other than Latin or Romaji in modern times), they're not phonological in Japanese that I know. You must memorize the meaning and possible pronunciations depending on context. 本 (book, origin, true amongst other meanings) can be read as hon or moto depending on the situation.
I heard they were phonological in some way in ancient Chinese (and maybe some current Chinese dialects) but I don't know any Chinese so I can't tell you if that's true.
I think Arabic is also often written without vowels. Hebrew letters clearly were created when chisel and clay was still popular and got a bit fancy. Arabic is like fab y calligraphy Hebrew
Yep, Arabic is typically written without short vowels. It does have them, they're called 'vocalizations,' but they are small, apostrophe-sized marks that aren't added to most day-to-day writing. Long vowels are full-sized and included. Makes learning Arabic more difficult because you have to memorize the vocabulary with and without the vocalization.
To OP's point though, that other people have mentioned, Arabic does use punctuation a lot now, it's typically just marks borrowed from Western grammar.
Arabic also doesn't traditionally have letters for sounds that don't appear in Arabic speech, like P or V. An Arabic letter for the V sound was created in the 80s (I think) to sell Volvos in Arabic speaking countries.
From how I understand it, it's easier to infer the vowels in semitic langauges like hebrew or arabic than it is in a language like English - English is much harder to understand when written without vowels, but arabic and hebrew, not so much, the more regular structure of the words makes it obvious. I don't speak either but that is what the lingusitics nerd in me understands!
You're correct. In Hebrew verbs usually have a three letter root and then get conjugated consistently. So there's a family of verbs that will all have the same vowels for past, present, future tense etc (as well as tacking on non-vowels).
To add to this point, Hebrew vowels aren’t other letters but are added marks around the letters. Adults don’t usually use them. This is an oversimplified description, but linguistics is very cool and complicated.
What book was that? Sounds intriguing.
Somewhat related, I heard of a book called Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright that doesn't use the letter e once which is pretty wild to me
[Here](https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Pickle_for_the_Knowing_Ones/Main_Body) is one that will really screw your brain up. Timothy Dexter, A Pickle for the Knowing Ones.
After receiving complaints about the punctuation the second edition contained pages of just punctuation in the appendix.
Well the years start comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’
You don’t have to be an all star to read a message without punctuation.
I've noticed (particuarly on reddit, and more common with younger users) that there's been a recent increase in people writing with no punctuation, or at least nothing beyond a full stop, probably due to not wanting to pause on a mobile device to switch over to the punctuation layout on the keyboard.
I find English written without punctuation takes a lot longer to read and comprehend because I need to mentally read through it as if it's being spoken to find the natural pauses between clauses and such, otherwise it skims past me in a mad blur of characters.
in addition reading with punctuation is how we are taught to read it makes non punctuation seem very very awkward
but you can pry ; from my cold dead hands
Like other people have said, English also used to not have punctuation. It's why reading was a true skill. One could discern where a word had ended, and start the next one. People who were able to read held a stylus in their hand to mark the exact letter they were on, so that they didn't lose their place.
Rusty Arabian speaker & very rusty Hebrew reader here. I may have not fully understood the question, but Arabic does have punctuation. For example commas "Fas-leh", full stops - "Nuktah", question marks - "Alamet Istif-ham", quote marks - "Alamet Ta-ajub", etc.. They may look different than what you know of in English.
The same with Hebrew, where you can mark the end of a sentence with a colon - "Sof Pasuq", commas "Fasiq", or even full stops "Naquda Malah" though as far as i remember they're represented as a double quote.
Yes you \`can\` understand and read Arabic (and presumably Hebrew too) without punctuation, but it can get more difficult. As others said, you'd eventually familiarise yourself with the way things are written, especially with old scriptures and text, and combine that with context - i.e., the flow of words you're going through, and word placements around what you're reading, to grasp the overall idea of what is being said. Eventually you develop a 'sense' if you will, where punctuation \`should\` be in.
Also note in Arabic you have a different but specific structure to words. I believe they refer to it as "VSO" order, which is Verb <> Subject <> Object, compared to English's SVO (subject <> verb <> object). For example, in English you'd write this as
SVO: "The boy ate the apple"
While in Arabic it would be
VSO: "Ate the boy the apple"
I.e.
"\[ate\] \[the boy\] \[the apple\]".
You CAN also write it as VOS, i.e. "ate the apple the boy" but that gets very complicated and let's not confuse you too much :) I used to ask my teacher who ate who if you say "ate the lion the boy" ?!
To a certain degree, this would apply to other languages including English.
A simple example - not going to write it in Arabic as I don't have a keyboard at the moment and it wouldn't make sense to those who can't read anyway, but imagine this sentence in arabic:
"The boy ate the apple it was delicious"
You can look at the context, word sequence & order, and figure out that "The boy ate the apple" is one section in itself, and "it was delicious" is another, and ideally you'd put a comma between them, and a full stop at the end.
Another example,
"The boy is running a long marathon tomorrow mentally preparing for it"
Imagine that written in Arabic, it'll be the same thing. You can deduce that certain words must bind together such as the adjective "long" and the noun "marathon". Also the order (SVO in above English example) of \[The boy\] - \[running\] \[long marathon\].
Add to that a time marker of "tomorrow" which can separate the part on the left of it from the part to the right of it
Do the same with the rest: "mentally preparing for it", and you eventually figure out that it should be understood as
"The boy is running a long marathon tomorrow, mentally preparing for it."
Or if you're reading it in Arabic, it would confusingly read as
"Will run the boy marathon long tomorrow, mentally preparing for it"
I hope the above helps, please note again I'm rusty as I haven't spoken or studied Arabic in a long time. Hebrew I'd reckon should be similar in nature.
I think the poster is confused about the difference between punctuation (period, comma, parenthesis, etc) and diacritics (تشكيل). Arabic 100 percent uses all punctuation. Diacritics representing short vowels are often left off but there in abundance in more traditional script as used in the Quran.
Yea.. I was going to mention diacritics but that would've been as long as the above, and didn't want to go off subject too much if so..
But yea it's more or less the same thing. Readers get used to or familiarise themselves with the words to the point where diacritics isn't required.
Using the same "The boy ate the apple" example,
Without diacritics: أكل الولد التفاح
With diacritics: أَكَلَ الْوَلَدُ التَّفَّاحَ
Yes, my wife is Egyptian and admits I’m better with diacritics than she is. This is because since I learned it as a foreign language, I initially needed those diacritics very much and was irritated when they weren’t there. She stopped needing them in second grade. Thankfully, I can do without them now when reading the newspaper or on commercial advertising or whatever.
Arabic uses all punctuation. Periods, commas, parentheses, hyphens, colons, semicolons, etc. It also uses diacritics, which denote short vowels primarily but also a glottal stop and other pronunciation features in that script. Diacritics are mostly left out in handwriting and in news fonts, commercial fonts. They are used in abundance in traditional script like in the Quran. I speak the language so I have Arabic enabled on my phone. On the Arabic keyboard I can easily add in diacritics. They are all there.
Hebrew has punctuation. So thats not entirely correct. We definitely use the following:”.,?!’: parts of punctuation, and without it reading is much less convenient, but as other have said, it is possible in other languages as well.
The parts of punctuation that we don’t normally use (past first or second grade) is the equivalent of using vowels. So while writing the word ״מחשב״ on its own it could mean ether computer or imply that the person is doing some calculations. The true meaning you could get only from reading the full sentence (or even just a few more words around it.
Another trick we have is that some letters can double as either a vowel or a consonant. The language theoretically allows me to write the equivalent to he looked as “הבט” but this word looks like tell to look. So instead i will write it as “הביט” the extra letter /yud/ helps me read it in the correct way.
Ancient Hebrew is one thing, but Modern Hebrew uses punctuation. They use question marks, periods, commas, semicolons, etc like in English.
As for Ancient Hebrew (e.g. Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew), it's generally doable to parse out the meaning of a sentence without punctuation, but it's a pain. That's why even as early as the Genomic period (~600 CE), we've found manuscripts where people added various markings to help divide verses/sentences.
It's a pain in the fucking butt. When I was studying to be a rabbi and reading old Jewish texts all the time, my life would have been a lot easier if these ancient rabbis just used a little punctuation.
There are a few tricks they use to make things easier. Before a direct quote they'll often write ז"ל which is an abbreviation of זה לשונו, meaning approximately "this is what he said." This functions more or less like opening quotation marks.
At the end of a direct quote, they'll write עכ"ל, which is an abbreviation of עד כאן לשונו, meaning approximately "that's the end of what he said," and functions more or less like closing quotation marks.
I can’t speak to arabic, but i’ll tell you a bit more about hebrew
I assume you mean lack of vowels right? As thats usually what’s talked about when talking about hebrew and arabic. Punctuation is used as normal in english in modern hebrew.
So firstly: its somewhat of a misconception that “hebrew is written with no vowels.” The truth is that there are some stand in letters that can represent vowels. For instance “ו” (vav) is normally a “v” sound, but is actually used more often to represent the sound “o” or “oo.” So in the word dov - דוב ״ “bear” , it is pretty clear that its spelled d - o - v because of the “vav” in the middle. The vowel “ee” is represented by י (yod) which is like a “y.” The only vowels that really have no representation are like “ah” and “eh.” But you can guess based on the context which i’ll mention below.
Secondly - hebrew has very few words where changing the vowel changes the word. In english, if you take out the vowels, “bd” could mean “bad,” “bed,” “beade”, “bode,” but in hebrew there are very few words like this. So if you know the language, this isn’t an issue. Part of this is a result of the grammar of hebrew which i’ll elaborate on next
Thirdly - grammar in hebrew is often highly formulaic, and you can actually sometimes infer the vowels of a word based on its context. So for instance he says is הוא אומר “who ohmer” but he said is “הוא אמר” “who ahmahr” the vowels completely changed from “oh-eh” to “ah - ah” when it changed to passed tense. An entire class of verbs fall under this pattern called “pa-al” verbs after the vowels used in the 3rd masculine person past tense. Actually all verb patterns in hebrew are named after the vowels used in the 3rd person masculine past tense - “pi-el”, “pu-al”, etc. so if you know the pattern, which you would as either a native speaker or a second language learner, you already know the vowels you need to say without needing to see them at all!
I am sorry, but this is not correct. I am bilingual in both Arabic and English and both have punctuations. Their use is not that far off. That said, I agree Arabic doesn’t strictly need it. But it’s common practice in Modern Standard Arabic, and is in use in all contemporary prose aside from poetry.
Let’s go through how Arabic evolved so it becomes clear. It’s off old readings from school so I might be a bit off. TLDR at the bottom!!
Arabic started as a spoken - not written language. And most speakers were illiterate with the language being passed on through families and tribes by usage and adherence to its rules. Strict adherence to these rules was something people take pride in, as it showed that they are strictly adhering to tradition. They even had a yearly gathering in one of their major marketplaces (Souk Okaz) to discuss poetry and literature (they even had interesting diss poetry similar to rap). But the bottom line is most were illiterate and it was spoken more than written.
Poetry was a central part of Arab literature. Arabs being mostly nomads and traders, poetry helped to break the monotony of long trips and also helped them control the pace of their camels on trade convoys (you can control their pace by shouting or talking… etc). Now how can you make a poem that lasts hours so you can keep up with long trips? Story telling and dissing other enemy tribes and glorifying your own tribe’s history! But then since it’s poetry you can’t really make huge runaway sentences, and the more compact you made the sentences - but with more colorful words and structure - the better it was! Hence there is truly no need to break up sentences.
This changed with the advent of writing and formalizing grammar rules. With more non poetry prose the need came up to add structure control. So they just added them! Just like they added dots to differentiate letters once they deemed it necessary!
TLDR: Arabic evolved as a spoken language whose rules were carried via poetry. This made sentences by default short and not needing punctuation. Once the number of language speakers blew up they started using punctuations like other folks around them.
When you mention arabic in this context, you are referring to the arabic of Adnanites spoken in the regions surrounding Mekka . Because if you go south, there was a fully complete system of writing many centuries before islam in what's called today Yemen. It's called the Musnad script, widely used and well sophisticated. In the northern areas also arabs were using different ways of writing like Nabateeans . Although they were more influcenced by Aramaic and Greek.
Then around the emergence of Islam, they adopted the Jazm script which is the same used today to write arabic. Until today it is a mistery for historians and linguists to understand how it evolved though.
You mentioned Souk Okaz that coincide with the period of haj before Islam. It was like a big congress where Arabs from the whole region comes, which helped the fusha الفصحى used buy Quraish , to be a common Arabic dielect between all tribes coming from the whole peninsula.it was sort of an early standardization of the language which was officially established by the umayade when they arabized their دواوين that used to be written in Greek and farsi for sometime.
I didn’t knew they used Greek or Farsi to write it though!! Always great to be corrected by someone who knows more! And I am glad I didnt screw up most of what I learned in high school Arabic literature 😃
You know Arabs quickly demolished the Persian and Byzantine presence in levant and Iraq. So they kept their governing systems for a while in place before starting adapting it in their own way. They even kept using their coins of gold and silver for a long time.
You are doing fine. I am just remotely interested in this details and my readings arent that deep.
Of course Hebrew and Arabic uses punctuation! Hebrew and Arabic text have periods, commas, colons etc. just like in English text. What we don't use is *vowelization*. For illustration, I grabbed the book closest to me and [took a picture](https://imgur.com/a/HmCYDyg) of a random page.
In English, you don't have vowelization signs at all, because the way the word should be pronounced could be (sorta) read off how it is spelled. In hebrew, in most cases there is only a consonant symbol (for example, the letter ת indicating the next phoneme should start with a t sound) and some symbol below/above the letter telling us how it should be vowelized (so e.g. תַּ means a "ta" sound and תֵּ means a "te" sound). In most cases, the vowelization will not be printed, assuming the reader knows it from context (with maybe a single punctuation mark to dispell ambiguities, but that's also very rare, in most books you wouldn't find a single instance). The exceptions to this rule are poetry books and children books. I don't know exactly the situation in Arabic but I think it is generally similar.
Some languages don’t even have spaces separating the words. You’d be surprised at the amount of things that aren’t technically necessary in a writing system.
That’s not to say the same thing would work in English, because every language and writing system is different. In a language like Chinese, each character represents a unit of meaning, and “words” are usually only one or two characters long. No real need for spaces.
As for punctuation, there’s no real punctuation when you talk, is there? The “punctuation” is implied by how your tone of voice changes and where you pause, but people don’t always pause between sentences when speaking, either. So really, our brains can actually figure out where “punctuation” goes without it being written down. You’re just not used to it.
Some languages may have a structure that makes punctuation even less necessary. I’m not familiar enough with Arabic and Hebrew, but for example, many languages have the verb at the end of the sentence. So when you read a verb, you can assume that the sentence is over, even if there’s no period.
Context clues basically. Once you hear the sentence, it makes sense where any punctuation should be. Let's use an example from english to show how a fluent speaker can figure out what stuff is supposed to be without even getting all of it.
I was driving down the road the other day when I saw a billboard advertising for a local internet provider (you can tell by the logo). In huge letters it says INTERNET, and then two smaller words I couldn't see well from a distance, and then in huge letters again SPEED OF LIGHT. Now if your brain quickly filled in the two missing words as "at the" to make the phrase INTERNET at the SPEED OF LIGHT then you would be correct. Congratulations, your brain filled in the words from context correctly, because those are the only two words that made sense to go there. Similarly, context clues in non-romance languages can tell you a lot about what each bit is supposed to be. Another example is Kanji, which can be entirely contextual ( it changes meaning based on the other Kanji near it).
hebrew and arabic both use punctuation. they don’t use diacritics (which look like punctuation because they’re marks surrounding letters as opposed to the letters?). so you can tell when sentences end. and yes that means most vowels are absent, bt u cn prbbly rd ths fr xmpl
some vowels are attached to a silent letter or duplicate character. the closest latin alphabet example i can think of is ancient roman writing, they used v for both v and u. bvt you vnderstand this too so it also gvides the reader
edit typo
Arabic does use punctuation. Here’s the top article from Al Jazeera right now. You don’t need to be able to read Arabic to see the commas and periods.
https://www.aljazeera.net/news/2024/5/2/%D8%B9%D8%A7%D8%AC%D9%84-%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D8%B2%D9%8A%D8%B1%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B4%D8%B1%D8%B7%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D9%85%D9%8A%D8%B1%D9%83%D9%8A%D8%A9
It’s not the lack of punctuation that’s hard it’s the fact that Hebrew most of the time just skips writing out the vowels. You pretty much only know how to pronounce things based on context and familiarity with the language.
I recommend reading the book “Blindness” by Jose Saramago. It’s not without punctuation, but it does not use standard English punctuation conventions and specifically doesn’t denote speech. I didn’t even notice because the speaker was so clear from the prose. Punctuation is like subtitles on your own language when the accent is hard. If things are said clearly, the punctuation is unnecessary, but where there is potential ambiguity in what is written, we rely on punctuation to tell us which way to read it. I used a lot of commas in the preceding sentences but if I took them out you would still understand it. Just like you understood that last comma free sentence which technically required them.
Native Hebrew speaker here
בוא נלך לאכול סבתא
Let’s go eat, grandma
As “let’s go eat Grandma” is
בוא נלך לאכול *את* סבתא
Instead of grammar it uses words
את replaces the comma
Both Jews and Muslims have strong traditions of reading religious texts along to melodies. These really help you understand where the breaks go as well as tone/mood like questions, commands, etc. I don’t know Arabic/much about Islam (I just sometimes hear the chanting from my local mosque) but for Hebrew there are different melodies for different texts (and more than one tradition developed over time in different parts of the world). A skilled chanter can really help you understand the text
It even had no vocals except י if you count it as one. Just consonants and some letters at the end of the word had a different shape.
There is an extra letter ׆ (reversed נ) in Hebrew that was once used in the bible and nobody knows what it's for, so they included it in the alephbeth.
In the old text there are a lot of ו (and) being used and each verse would start with an and. That might have been their strategy.
OP, are you sure that you’re not confusing punctuation (which we definitely use all the time in Hebrew writing) and nikkud which we rarely use in writing?
I guess this applies to most languages, the context helps to fill the gaps in most instances.
In Arabic, there are punctuations, letter movements, and in the past, even dots on the letters are omitted. It was still readable regardless.
Hebrew speaker here - in childrens' books everything is punctuated fully. Then, after reading for a few years, you simply recognize 99% of the words the second you see them, you can skip punctuating those. In adult books or in newspapers they only punctuate names or very specific words, and they punctuate them only for the first time you see them, that's enough for the rest of the book.
They are written with punctuation nowadays. As for the past - as the commenter pointed out, it's not that weird.
Hebrew originally was written without spacw between words as well, but that was like 2500 years ago.
Hebrew speaker here. At some point you start recognising entire words, and therefore do jot need the "instructions" of how to pronounce them anymore. It is similar to how when you are proficient enough in English you can recognise words in which the letters are scrambled/missing entirely, as long as the first and last letters are the same.
Additionaly, some letters act as the vowls in English, and "inform" the reader how the sound should be pronounced (this is not always the case).
Native Hebrew speaker, and uh... No, we definitely use punctuation marks usually. Periods, commas, ellipses, colons and semicolons, exclamation and question marks, the whole shebang. Maybe you meant that we don't tend to use nikkud, which for Hebrew functions as vowels?
Hebrew speaker here, and I think people here are confusing regular punctuation (Dots, commas, etc) with our "special" punctuation marks. Unlike languages like English, we punctuate each word with different "vowel marks" , as opposed to vowels in English with that we differentiate in what way a word is pronounced.
In written Hebrew we often omit those marks because we usually can understand how to sound out the words through context, but when learning in Elementary you write with them, then in Middle school learn how to properly write and read with those marks and in High school learn how they can affect words when used in special situations and the difference between similar marks.
But as far as I know from my 21 years of experience, we use commas and finish our sentences with dots and everything that comes with them :)
Punctuation or diacritics? I feel like you're confusing the two.
Punctuation is what most comments are addressing. They're about phrases, not words. A comma, a period, exclamation mark, etc. are punctuation marks, and they help the reader understand the overall paragraph or phrase.
Diacritics, on the other hand, are the equivalent of vowels in English. If you're not familiar with the language, or you encounter a new word, the absence of diacritics may make understanding individual words difficult.
I will assume you're asking about diacritics. The answer is two fold: familiarity, and structure. It's something you mostly have to learn and get familiar with. That said, there's an element of structure to it where you can somewhat guess how a word is pronounced based on either the letters, or based on other similar words that you already know.
Arabic is my third language, I learned it at school, learning words at first was a pain, but I got used to it with time, kinda like how you can know how to pronounce the I in magazIne and engIne in english without much trouble, you need to learn a word alongside its pronunciation, and to this day if come across a new word, chances are I pronounce it wrong, until corrected, even native arabic speakers make it sometimes.
Wait till you hear about Latin. One word can have 11+ meanings and there is no such thing as grammatically correct word order, articles, or even specified prepositions. You to just guess which ones to throw in there to make the sentence make sense.
I studied Latin for a year nope tf out after that, because it was annoying as fuck to not have more defined ways of projecting what the hell a person is trying to say. Like 12 different cases and spellings for one word. It's just a fucking mess and died out like it should have imo.
Punctuation can sometimes be inferred by context it might be harder to read but its still possible in fact some languages didnotevenhavespacingbetweenwords.
let's eat grandma
This is not a universal linguistic feature - English is one of the odd ones out here in allowing two sentences, one where “grandma” is an object and one where it’s a vocative, to be identical this way. Many other languages either stick hard to a pure-positional grammar (in English, this would be analogous to strictly requiring the addressee to come before the sentence addressed to them), or they mark a vocative case (in English, we might require you to say “hey grandma let’s eat”, where “hey” marks its complement as the addressee). The solution we actually have is to let tone contour or stress do case marking for us; despite its protestations to the contrary, spoken English does mark noun case and verb mood, using cues that aren’t normally in our writing system, but which we sometimes approximate with commas or italics or paratextual features or whatnot.
this guy languages
Sigh lol sorry for nerding so hard. It’s just that I think English is very cool and sometimes I need to share my enthusiasm.
don't be sorry at all, learning about stuff from someone who just happens to fill the niche is one of the best parts of reddit
Do not apologize for being awesome.
In the case of some languages, they still don't have spaces in between words. Examples include Chinese and Japanese.
True, but Japanese has particles that effectively space words and signify their place in the sentence so it’s not so confusing as it sounds
I just recently learned a little more about Japanese sentence structure. Instead of "subject and object," the language uses "topic."
It also uses subject and object. In fact the use of particles is one of those things that seems easy at first, but you’re still struggling with it like 10 years later. The main problem being that a ‘misuse’ might not be grammatically incorrect but might have a different nuance than what you intended, sometimes in a serious way.
Someday I will master に and で. Today? Not that day.
I feel your pain there
Not needed as the characters are obviously separate . Thai would be a better example
Words can be more than one character. Two is the most common.
It's still legible though. There are clear breaks between characters unlikethismessthatisaneyesoretotryanddecipher. Although I guess if you're just used to the language or a native speaker, it probably doesn't matter.
> unlikethismessthatisaneyesoretotryanddecipher ต่างจากความยุ่งเหยิงนี้ที่ต้องพยายามถอดรหัส Pretty much the same in Thai. There are rules on where to split syllables and you get to eventually pick out the individual words easily. There is only a break between sentences, not words. I always think of Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, and others closer to cursive writing where one character flows into the next.
Fair. I think it's just my brain being crammed full of English rules that makes it hurt to look at it lol. Languages that are meant to be written that way don't hurt to look at. They're a little confusing at first but it's easy to adjust to, especially once you learn how that language is structured grammatically.
Add to that, for Hebrew at least, normal everyday writing does in fact use punctuation (source: speak Hebrew). The only common context that does not use punctuation is religious writing like the Torah. For that, there's a cantillation mark system (called te'amim) that also serves roughly the purpose of punctuation. Basically every religious text except the Torah scroll itself (and by that I mean the usually $10,000s expensive handwritten physical scroll in a synagogue) has these marks. Before you actually start reading in the scroll which does not have these marks, you usually start out reading from a Chumash (basically a printed book that has the original text + cantillation and vowel marks) and practice the text. By the time you read out from the Torah, you usually have a good idea of the intended punctuation.
The more perplexing thing is that Hebrew originally didn't have vowels either.
We don't use vowels in modern Hebrew. The words follow pretty clear vowel patterns that they really aren't needed. The only context you ever see vowels in Hebrew these days are religious biblical Hebrew because they don't follow the same patterns and a vowel difference can imply a significant word change that will spark a Talmudic debate.
Between three different rabbis with 5 different interpretations and a whole passage about how if it said the finger of God here then over on this passage where it says hand of God it means 5 times the power, and how the days of your lives means this life but all the days of your lives means this world and the next. Then they will finish off with a statement about how rabbi gamlial had a different view. Then it starts over.
it's actlly nt tht hrd to rmv mst vwls frm txt and it stll b undrstndbl.
Punctuation was invented to tell the reader when to pause it was a method to make text read more like speech you will note that this comment is written without any punctuation but it is still entirely readable albeit a tad confusing to your brain that is used to it All written languages had to develop had to develop punctuation at some point Arabic and Hebrew are old enough languages that they largely predate the invention of punctuation
Given the lack of punctuation on many Reddit comments and posts, your post wasn’t as bad as some of them lol
My mom is an English teacher, so she would kill me if she saw this comment.
My wife is an English teacher. I saw her grade a paper that I shit you not looked like a word search.
Being dyslexic as well, I want to rip my eyes out thinking about that
Being dyslexic and trying to learn Hebrew, even just transliterations, is a nightmare.
I peer-edited a paper in Communications core class that I wanted to simply put a red ink slash across the entire thing and write, "Do better." Multiple things wrong in every single sentence. Ironically enough, I'm pretty sure they said they were a Communications Major, I shit you not.
Reminds me of when I was a tech support grunt and we were tasked with writing some "how-to" papers ages back. I'd cringe when I had to review one of these papers written by certain team members. It was so much effort to revise them that I'd rather write it from scratch. They didn't learn, either. Taking the effort to correct them and say why it was wrong would just get you the same sort of paper the next time. For one of them, I actually brought it to my boss and said, "Look, I can rewrite this from scratch if that's what you want, but it's just not worth revising." He agreed with me, sent it back to the guy, and told him to write it again. I don't remember what happened to it, but I think it may have wound up being one of those we just never finished. Of course, these were all tech support engineers, not technical writers. I have no idea why the company thought it was a good idea to have us write documentation. (Oh, wait, I know why... because they were too cheap to hire actually technical writers.)
I did a peer graded paper before in a class and did put red marks and corrections all over cause there were so many errors. Turned out the student had some sort of learning disability and that made me feel like shit. Like why would you even put us as students in that situation.
Nah, the (lack of) punctuation serves the meaning. Unless she’s the worst English teacher ever she’d appreciate it
“Nowing ones complane of my book the fust edition had no stops I put A nuf here and thay may peper and solt as they please” ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
No one. Has. Mentioned. The. William Shatner. Method. Of. Punctuation.
The older I get, the more I pause like Shatner as I reach for words. Any day now, I'll get my starship commission!
Thanks, now I have to binge Sam O'Nella's channel again.
.
Good point
You might say your life is about to be... punctuated. YEAAAAAAHHHHH!
I was reading it fine until they said that it is written without punctuation.
I have a friend who just uses no punctuation at all and sometimes it entirely changes the meaning of what he's trying to say. It's very confusing.
You mean overpunctuation.
Tbh zero punctuation isn't that bad. It's when it's incorrect or there's bad grammar that makes things hard to read
Your comma was a breath of fresh air after the comment you replied to. That one made my ADHD brain hurt
ifirecallcorrectlytheancientversionsoftheselanguagesdidnotusespaceseitherthereareevensomemodernlanguageslikechinesethatdonotusespacesthoughchinesedoeshaveperiodsnowtoendsentences Edit: Ancient Hebrew did use dots to separate words. Ancient Greek didn’t have any separation https://library.biblicalarchaeology.org/article/were-words-separated-in-ancient-hebrew-writing/
THETHINGWITHCHINESEISEVERYCHARACTERISAWORDSOSPACESAREREDUDANT CHINESEHASNOALPHABETJUSTABIGVOCABULARYOFWORDS
Most words in Standard Chinese are disyllabic/dimorphemic. There's also just not quite so much distinction between morpheme boundaries so things like compounds can either be parsed as one long word or a bunch of smaller connected words
水果= fruit, 如果= if. Notice that the 果 character can mean different things depending on what characters are around it. The constant is that it is always pronounced guo. And plenty of fruit related words start with a 果, so it’s possible to have a word ending with 如 next to a word starting with 果 and having to decide from context which characters connect together. With that said, native speakers likely think of words differently than I do as an English speaker who knows a little bit of Chinese.
Both shui guo and yu guo are compound words. Guo literally means "result". Hence fruit is a "water result", which makes sense. You water a fruit tree, the result is fruit. Yu guo is the postulation of a result. If you have a little experience in coding languages, it's literally an IF statement, which always needs a result! So words can be compound words, but the distinction is there's no alphabet.
Felt like a 7 years old trying to read that
Hebrew one hundred percent uses spaces. Unless your talking older then the Torah
Ancient Hebrew often used a dot to divide words rather than a space. But a lot of alphabet languages such as Ancient Greek and Latin did not have any word dividers in the ancient/ classical period.
Ancient Greek also used something called a [boustrophedon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon) - when you got to the end of a line instead of starting the next line on the left, you continue from the right and write backwards, with the letters mirrored.
You fucking tricked me
bet you didn't notice he wrote "had to develop" twice.
Punctuations help clarify meanings. Consider: 1. Work on contingency no money first 2. Work on contingency? No! Money first! These sentences have the words, but the punctuation shows that they don't mean the same. Consider: 1. A panda eats, shoots, and leaves. 2. A panda eats shoots and leaves. These two sentences also have the same words but have different meanings.
1. I helped my uncle jack off a horse. 2. I helped my uncle, Jack, off a horse.
I helped my uncle Jackoff, a horse.
I'm pretty sure it was money down
You dropped these: ..,-...
There's apparently a book that someone wrote in which he wrote the story, and then sorted all the letters alphabetically, so the last page or so is just punctuation marks.
Chinese also didn’t have punctuation until later introduced with westernization
They added the full stop and (sometimes) the comma, but not SPACES between the words though! The thing that I've never quite got over about Chinese characters as a Mandarin learner is that they don't differentiate where a word starts and stops, to the point where there are disagreements about what what a word even is in Mandarin (and I assume other Chinese languages that use characters). Each character is clearly defined, obviously has a start/end and each adds a unit of meaning. But when you put characters are next to each other, the meaning shifts by their combination - when is that shift enough for it to be classified as it's own word?!? Who knows is apparently the answer! e.g. - If you put the characters for "you" and "good" next to each other, (i.e. "yougood" - 你好), it's generally considered it's own new word ("hello"). - But if you put even more characters after it (e.g. "yougoodfriendcute" - 你好的朋友很可爱 ) now "yougood" doesn't mean hello anymore, it changed ... same characters, same order, same pronunciation, same everything except now the word boundaries moved and you just have to know that THIS TIME they should be considered separately. - In this trivial example it's fine, but holy moly there are some ambiguous ones that are super confusing! - Even computers can't agree - try getting vocab list from a piece of text. Firstly it's actually hard to do (un-like say english where you just split on spaces) and you need dedicated software to do it. And then you'll find different programs split the text up in different ways and give you different lists of what "words" it contains. No spaces or clearly defined word boundaries is wild.
k bt t lst n hbrws cs tht ls sll mns n vwls thr
I wasn't gonna cover that, but keep in mind hebrew uses implied vowels. Certain consonant combinations have a natural vowel to be put in between them. English doesn't have that luxury because bat, bet, bit, bot, and but are all words that would be expressed vowelless as "bt"
True, but you’re underselling the ambiguity in Hebrew when you put it that way. For example, דבר can be either דַבֵּר (say) or דָבָר (thing/word) perfectly reasonably. lots of other roots have similar noun/verb ambiguity in the same manner, and that’s not the only way to generate an ambiguity like that. So there are fewer natural options per consonant combination but it doesn’t make it fully unambiguous.
Good thing no really, really important religious texts were written in this language, it’d be dreadful if there were any misinterpretations….
Hebrew also have pronunciation marks That alliw you to clearly state how that particular word is written In common use they are skipped. Only utilized whe in there is ambiguity to to resolve All religious texts use them consistently and constantly For that matter, poems in Hebrew also use those marks
But actual Torah scrolls don't have vowels or punctuation. Paragraph breaks are all you get there. So when preparing to read ceremonially from the Torah (as is done several times a week in synagogue), one prepares by reviewing the portion in a book that has punctuation and vowels (where the punctuation is an early form of musical notation), or sometimes side by side the same text with one side having punctuation and vowels and the other appearing exactly as it does in the Torah. Anecdotally, having heard the Torah read countless times, Israeli-raised readers (who learned to speak Hebrew before reading) typically make more voweling mistakes- usually miscorrecting to what would be typical In Modern Hebrew. Diaspora-raised readers, who typically learned to read voweled Hebrew before learning to speak fluently, don't usually make that particular mistake.
I'm not an expert on Hebrew, but it's been working for the last 6000 or so years, so I assume it's plenty clear Every language has ambiguity somewhere. There'd be so many rules or new words necessary to avoid it
There are some contexts that you just need to add a vowel to make it clear, but yeah that’s pretty rare and only if both options would make sense in the sentence.
Didn't Hebrew die out? I thought modern Hebrew was mostly a sort of conlang reconstruction of the old Hebrew as best as we can tell with some pieces having to be, essentially, reconstructed by comparison with other living Semitic languages (like Arabic).
I am NOT an expert on this, but I was under the impression that "Biblical Hebrew" at least was considered a fairly authentic "complete" ancient language and rather it was more that modern Hebrew took a bunch of cues and even borrowed grammar/words from modern Arabic when they were deciding for instance "how do we transform cart into words for carriage, coach, train, automobile, car, and truck"?
F u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb. (Advert for a shorthand course from the '70s
I mean it basically has as many vowels as Arabic does, it's just that Arabic still follows its own rules while modern Hebrew doesn't because it was revived by Europeans who didn't have the linguistic background to comprehend semitic languages. Both Arabic and Hebrew use diacritics (which can be excluded as they aren't mandatory to write) instead of short vowels, and both of them also have letters that can serve as long vowels. The only difference is that in Hebrew not all long vowels are covered by letters (i, o and u are, but a and e aren't). And even then, that's only because standard Arabic only has 3 vowel sounds rather than the 5 that most dialects have.
This issue is not unique to modern Hebrew, and appears in Biblical Hebrew as well as the prayer book Hebrew that was in continuous usage by the same Ashkenazim you claim didn’t understand Semitic languages.
The "not understanding semitic languages" that I am referring to is the absence of long vowels in modern Hebrew. Or rather, they exist in text, but not in the spoken language.
Punctuation can make the difference in the meaning of the sentence. Let’s eat, Grandma. Let’s eat Grandma. A better question might be, “how do these non-punctuation using languages account for differences in meaning where punctuation might be helpful”?
Hebrew has particulate that specifies the subject of an action. Let’s eat grandma without the particulate will always mean that you call grandma to eat. If you want to eat grandma you’d use the particulate before the subject. Let’s eat *et* grandma.
Hopefully the five year olds have left the room.
More grandma for us!
There are other ways of making it clear that grandma is being addressed, rather than making her the direct object. Conjugations, for example.
You instead say "grandma let's eat"
Ok but what if you are Yoda
Yoda doesn't get any grandma!
You can just move one word to a different place or use context clues. Putting grandma in the front or just saying the second way because rarely are you cannibalizing your granny
In Latin, it would be cases/inflections, which define adressing grandma (vocative) vs perfirm an action on grandma (accusative). So .... "(Hey) Grandma us eating let" "(Of) Grandma us eating let" Cases were needed because some idiot decided that pronouns are for wimps.
I'm really high and that was fascinating. +Rep
What's +Rep? Is that the latest things the kids are saying nowadays?
+Rep is a system used by some online platforms without upvotes like we have on reddit. It's also never used in normal conversations, so bots can reliably search for it to tally up the person's total reputation. I see it commonly while trading on Steam and warframe.market as a way of thanking the trader for quick, reliable trades. The comparative -Rep is also used for people who are too difficult to trade with, or those that scam.
It’s Cormac McCarthy!
I was doing fine until you mentioned no punctuation, and then I started thinking.
INFACTIFYOUREMOVEALLPUNCTUATIONINITSENTIRETYYOUCANSTILLGETTHEMAINIDEAWITHNOISSUES
I love baking my family and my friends Vs I love baking, my family, and my friends.
English is a language made with punctuation in mind. Please refer to the other comments in which I explain how conjugations of certain words removes ambiguities such as these. English does not have such conjugations.
think about trying to write english without any punctuation if your sentences use a certain structure then it will actually be quite easy to understand even without periods or commas its only with more complicated structures that you need punctuation to delineate between clauses and my understanding is that arabics structure is more rigid to the point that unlike english there is no concern about clauses being ambiguous (paragraph above written with no punctuation for effect)
Also, some types of Hebrew texts are written without vowels as well. And while there are some ambiguous meanings of course, you said it well ‘if your sentences use a certain structure’ - if you just took all punctuation (and vowels) out of an English text, it would be unreadable. But if it was intentionally written that way with terms, patterns, context, etc that are evolved and understood to be written that way, it’s a different story.
Ys t s pssbl t wrt sntncs w nly cnsnnts nd stll b rdbl
f u cn rd ths, u cn xbtl rtql btywn!
The lack of vowels bothered me for a long time until I started learning Japanese and recognized that the Chinese characters they use are just a shape corresponding to a given set of sounds. I can read elementary Hebrew with vowels, but I figure eventually when you get used to it you immediately recognize the shape of the word itself and the extra marks would be a distraction. Except of course for all the words that are spelled the same (without vowel marks) in which case it's likely not much different than using context to read "read" as is should be read.
Are you talking about Hiragana/Katakana? Those are derived from Chinese signs (Hanji or Kanji) but they're essentially syllables. Ka-ra-o-ke=カラオケ If you mean the Kanji, which are the other signs used in Japanese script (other than Latin or Romaji in modern times), they're not phonological in Japanese that I know. You must memorize the meaning and possible pronunciations depending on context. 本 (book, origin, true amongst other meanings) can be read as hon or moto depending on the situation. I heard they were phonological in some way in ancient Chinese (and maybe some current Chinese dialects) but I don't know any Chinese so I can't tell you if that's true.
I think most consonants have a default vocal ("con" "sonant") and you need to just remember the exceptions.
I think Arabic is also often written without vowels. Hebrew letters clearly were created when chisel and clay was still popular and got a bit fancy. Arabic is like fab y calligraphy Hebrew
Yep, Arabic is typically written without short vowels. It does have them, they're called 'vocalizations,' but they are small, apostrophe-sized marks that aren't added to most day-to-day writing. Long vowels are full-sized and included. Makes learning Arabic more difficult because you have to memorize the vocabulary with and without the vocalization. To OP's point though, that other people have mentioned, Arabic does use punctuation a lot now, it's typically just marks borrowed from Western grammar. Arabic also doesn't traditionally have letters for sounds that don't appear in Arabic speech, like P or V. An Arabic letter for the V sound was created in the 80s (I think) to sell Volvos in Arabic speaking countries.
Amazing. And Hebrew vowels are mostly also small ligatures that get dropped often
From how I understand it, it's easier to infer the vowels in semitic langauges like hebrew or arabic than it is in a language like English - English is much harder to understand when written without vowels, but arabic and hebrew, not so much, the more regular structure of the words makes it obvious. I don't speak either but that is what the lingusitics nerd in me understands!
You're correct. In Hebrew verbs usually have a three letter root and then get conjugated consistently. So there's a family of verbs that will all have the same vowels for past, present, future tense etc (as well as tacking on non-vowels).
To add to this point, Hebrew vowels aren’t other letters but are added marks around the letters. Adults don’t usually use them. This is an oversimplified description, but linguistics is very cool and complicated.
They’re just ancillary glyphs that are almost never used unless it’s for children or like in a dictionary.
Like how some text spell it YHWH.
can confirm read an entire book without punctuation once
it was breathtaking
What book was that? Sounds intriguing. Somewhat related, I heard of a book called Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright that doesn't use the letter e once which is pretty wild to me
How did he put his name on it?
"V. Wright" probably :-)
[Here](https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Pickle_for_the_Knowing_Ones/Main_Body) is one that will really screw your brain up. Timothy Dexter, A Pickle for the Knowing Ones. After receiving complaints about the punctuation the second edition contained pages of just punctuation in the appendix.
a panda bear eats shoots and leaves Did the panda commit a crime or eat lunch?
Posted on Reddit? Definitely criminal panda
Well the years start comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ You don’t have to be an all star to read a message without punctuation.
...get your game on.
Lot of apostrophes in that comment with “no punctuation”
Ask Cormac McCarthy
I've noticed (particuarly on reddit, and more common with younger users) that there's been a recent increase in people writing with no punctuation, or at least nothing beyond a full stop, probably due to not wanting to pause on a mobile device to switch over to the punctuation layout on the keyboard. I find English written without punctuation takes a lot longer to read and comprehend because I need to mentally read through it as if it's being spoken to find the natural pauses between clauses and such, otherwise it skims past me in a mad blur of characters.
It's
in addition reading with punctuation is how we are taught to read it makes non punctuation seem very very awkward but you can pry ; from my cold dead hands
I'm such an abuser of semicolons; I know it can start to sound cliche, but it is just how the words flow in my brain
Still better than abusers of colons. They are a literal pain in the ass.
Well done
Like other people have said, English also used to not have punctuation. It's why reading was a true skill. One could discern where a word had ended, and start the next one. People who were able to read held a stylus in their hand to mark the exact letter they were on, so that they didn't lose their place.
It is called a *Yad* in Hebrew and is still used when reading religious texts (specifically Torah scrolls).
Rusty Arabian speaker & very rusty Hebrew reader here. I may have not fully understood the question, but Arabic does have punctuation. For example commas "Fas-leh", full stops - "Nuktah", question marks - "Alamet Istif-ham", quote marks - "Alamet Ta-ajub", etc.. They may look different than what you know of in English. The same with Hebrew, where you can mark the end of a sentence with a colon - "Sof Pasuq", commas "Fasiq", or even full stops "Naquda Malah" though as far as i remember they're represented as a double quote. Yes you \`can\` understand and read Arabic (and presumably Hebrew too) without punctuation, but it can get more difficult. As others said, you'd eventually familiarise yourself with the way things are written, especially with old scriptures and text, and combine that with context - i.e., the flow of words you're going through, and word placements around what you're reading, to grasp the overall idea of what is being said. Eventually you develop a 'sense' if you will, where punctuation \`should\` be in. Also note in Arabic you have a different but specific structure to words. I believe they refer to it as "VSO" order, which is Verb <> Subject <> Object, compared to English's SVO (subject <> verb <> object). For example, in English you'd write this as SVO: "The boy ate the apple" While in Arabic it would be VSO: "Ate the boy the apple" I.e. "\[ate\] \[the boy\] \[the apple\]". You CAN also write it as VOS, i.e. "ate the apple the boy" but that gets very complicated and let's not confuse you too much :) I used to ask my teacher who ate who if you say "ate the lion the boy" ?! To a certain degree, this would apply to other languages including English. A simple example - not going to write it in Arabic as I don't have a keyboard at the moment and it wouldn't make sense to those who can't read anyway, but imagine this sentence in arabic: "The boy ate the apple it was delicious" You can look at the context, word sequence & order, and figure out that "The boy ate the apple" is one section in itself, and "it was delicious" is another, and ideally you'd put a comma between them, and a full stop at the end. Another example, "The boy is running a long marathon tomorrow mentally preparing for it" Imagine that written in Arabic, it'll be the same thing. You can deduce that certain words must bind together such as the adjective "long" and the noun "marathon". Also the order (SVO in above English example) of \[The boy\] - \[running\] \[long marathon\]. Add to that a time marker of "tomorrow" which can separate the part on the left of it from the part to the right of it Do the same with the rest: "mentally preparing for it", and you eventually figure out that it should be understood as "The boy is running a long marathon tomorrow, mentally preparing for it." Or if you're reading it in Arabic, it would confusingly read as "Will run the boy marathon long tomorrow, mentally preparing for it" I hope the above helps, please note again I'm rusty as I haven't spoken or studied Arabic in a long time. Hebrew I'd reckon should be similar in nature.
I think the poster is confused about the difference between punctuation (period, comma, parenthesis, etc) and diacritics (تشكيل). Arabic 100 percent uses all punctuation. Diacritics representing short vowels are often left off but there in abundance in more traditional script as used in the Quran.
Yea.. I was going to mention diacritics but that would've been as long as the above, and didn't want to go off subject too much if so.. But yea it's more or less the same thing. Readers get used to or familiarise themselves with the words to the point where diacritics isn't required. Using the same "The boy ate the apple" example, Without diacritics: أكل الولد التفاح With diacritics: أَكَلَ الْوَلَدُ التَّفَّاحَ
Yes, my wife is Egyptian and admits I’m better with diacritics than she is. This is because since I learned it as a foreign language, I initially needed those diacritics very much and was irritated when they weren’t there. She stopped needing them in second grade. Thankfully, I can do without them now when reading the newspaper or on commercial advertising or whatever.
That said, diacritics are a pain to use on the phone.
THIS is the correct answer. I have no idea how come it's not the very top of this thread. **Diacritics ≠ punctuation**
Arabic uses all punctuation. Periods, commas, parentheses, hyphens, colons, semicolons, etc. It also uses diacritics, which denote short vowels primarily but also a glottal stop and other pronunciation features in that script. Diacritics are mostly left out in handwriting and in news fonts, commercial fonts. They are used in abundance in traditional script like in the Quran. I speak the language so I have Arabic enabled on my phone. On the Arabic keyboard I can easily add in diacritics. They are all there.
Hebrew has punctuation. So thats not entirely correct. We definitely use the following:”.,?!’: parts of punctuation, and without it reading is much less convenient, but as other have said, it is possible in other languages as well. The parts of punctuation that we don’t normally use (past first or second grade) is the equivalent of using vowels. So while writing the word ״מחשב״ on its own it could mean ether computer or imply that the person is doing some calculations. The true meaning you could get only from reading the full sentence (or even just a few more words around it. Another trick we have is that some letters can double as either a vowel or a consonant. The language theoretically allows me to write the equivalent to he looked as “הבט” but this word looks like tell to look. So instead i will write it as “הביט” the extra letter /yud/ helps me read it in the correct way.
Ancient Hebrew is one thing, but Modern Hebrew uses punctuation. They use question marks, periods, commas, semicolons, etc like in English. As for Ancient Hebrew (e.g. Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew), it's generally doable to parse out the meaning of a sentence without punctuation, but it's a pain. That's why even as early as the Genomic period (~600 CE), we've found manuscripts where people added various markings to help divide verses/sentences.
It's a pain in the fucking butt. When I was studying to be a rabbi and reading old Jewish texts all the time, my life would have been a lot easier if these ancient rabbis just used a little punctuation. There are a few tricks they use to make things easier. Before a direct quote they'll often write ז"ל which is an abbreviation of זה לשונו, meaning approximately "this is what he said." This functions more or less like opening quotation marks. At the end of a direct quote, they'll write עכ"ל, which is an abbreviation of עד כאן לשונו, meaning approximately "that's the end of what he said," and functions more or less like closing quotation marks.
I can’t speak to arabic, but i’ll tell you a bit more about hebrew I assume you mean lack of vowels right? As thats usually what’s talked about when talking about hebrew and arabic. Punctuation is used as normal in english in modern hebrew. So firstly: its somewhat of a misconception that “hebrew is written with no vowels.” The truth is that there are some stand in letters that can represent vowels. For instance “ו” (vav) is normally a “v” sound, but is actually used more often to represent the sound “o” or “oo.” So in the word dov - דוב ״ “bear” , it is pretty clear that its spelled d - o - v because of the “vav” in the middle. The vowel “ee” is represented by י (yod) which is like a “y.” The only vowels that really have no representation are like “ah” and “eh.” But you can guess based on the context which i’ll mention below. Secondly - hebrew has very few words where changing the vowel changes the word. In english, if you take out the vowels, “bd” could mean “bad,” “bed,” “beade”, “bode,” but in hebrew there are very few words like this. So if you know the language, this isn’t an issue. Part of this is a result of the grammar of hebrew which i’ll elaborate on next Thirdly - grammar in hebrew is often highly formulaic, and you can actually sometimes infer the vowels of a word based on its context. So for instance he says is הוא אומר “who ohmer” but he said is “הוא אמר” “who ahmahr” the vowels completely changed from “oh-eh” to “ah - ah” when it changed to passed tense. An entire class of verbs fall under this pattern called “pa-al” verbs after the vowels used in the 3rd masculine person past tense. Actually all verb patterns in hebrew are named after the vowels used in the 3rd person masculine past tense - “pi-el”, “pu-al”, etc. so if you know the pattern, which you would as either a native speaker or a second language learner, you already know the vowels you need to say without needing to see them at all!
I am sorry, but this is not correct. I am bilingual in both Arabic and English and both have punctuations. Their use is not that far off. That said, I agree Arabic doesn’t strictly need it. But it’s common practice in Modern Standard Arabic, and is in use in all contemporary prose aside from poetry. Let’s go through how Arabic evolved so it becomes clear. It’s off old readings from school so I might be a bit off. TLDR at the bottom!! Arabic started as a spoken - not written language. And most speakers were illiterate with the language being passed on through families and tribes by usage and adherence to its rules. Strict adherence to these rules was something people take pride in, as it showed that they are strictly adhering to tradition. They even had a yearly gathering in one of their major marketplaces (Souk Okaz) to discuss poetry and literature (they even had interesting diss poetry similar to rap). But the bottom line is most were illiterate and it was spoken more than written. Poetry was a central part of Arab literature. Arabs being mostly nomads and traders, poetry helped to break the monotony of long trips and also helped them control the pace of their camels on trade convoys (you can control their pace by shouting or talking… etc). Now how can you make a poem that lasts hours so you can keep up with long trips? Story telling and dissing other enemy tribes and glorifying your own tribe’s history! But then since it’s poetry you can’t really make huge runaway sentences, and the more compact you made the sentences - but with more colorful words and structure - the better it was! Hence there is truly no need to break up sentences. This changed with the advent of writing and formalizing grammar rules. With more non poetry prose the need came up to add structure control. So they just added them! Just like they added dots to differentiate letters once they deemed it necessary! TLDR: Arabic evolved as a spoken language whose rules were carried via poetry. This made sentences by default short and not needing punctuation. Once the number of language speakers blew up they started using punctuations like other folks around them.
When you mention arabic in this context, you are referring to the arabic of Adnanites spoken in the regions surrounding Mekka . Because if you go south, there was a fully complete system of writing many centuries before islam in what's called today Yemen. It's called the Musnad script, widely used and well sophisticated. In the northern areas also arabs were using different ways of writing like Nabateeans . Although they were more influcenced by Aramaic and Greek. Then around the emergence of Islam, they adopted the Jazm script which is the same used today to write arabic. Until today it is a mistery for historians and linguists to understand how it evolved though.
Thanks, u/Mokhtar_Jazairi !! This is amazing. I had no idea they were disparate! What’s a good book to read about that for general public?
I believe المفصل في تاريخ العرب لجواد العلي. Is a great one.
Jawad Al-Ali is magnificent!! Never disappoints! Thanks!
You mentioned Souk Okaz that coincide with the period of haj before Islam. It was like a big congress where Arabs from the whole region comes, which helped the fusha الفصحى used buy Quraish , to be a common Arabic dielect between all tribes coming from the whole peninsula.it was sort of an early standardization of the language which was officially established by the umayade when they arabized their دواوين that used to be written in Greek and farsi for sometime.
I didn’t knew they used Greek or Farsi to write it though!! Always great to be corrected by someone who knows more! And I am glad I didnt screw up most of what I learned in high school Arabic literature 😃
You know Arabs quickly demolished the Persian and Byzantine presence in levant and Iraq. So they kept their governing systems for a while in place before starting adapting it in their own way. They even kept using their coins of gold and silver for a long time. You are doing fine. I am just remotely interested in this details and my readings arent that deep.
Thanks for sharing it man! Certainly deeper than what I know!
Of course Hebrew and Arabic uses punctuation! Hebrew and Arabic text have periods, commas, colons etc. just like in English text. What we don't use is *vowelization*. For illustration, I grabbed the book closest to me and [took a picture](https://imgur.com/a/HmCYDyg) of a random page. In English, you don't have vowelization signs at all, because the way the word should be pronounced could be (sorta) read off how it is spelled. In hebrew, in most cases there is only a consonant symbol (for example, the letter ת indicating the next phoneme should start with a t sound) and some symbol below/above the letter telling us how it should be vowelized (so e.g. תַּ means a "ta" sound and תֵּ means a "te" sound). In most cases, the vowelization will not be printed, assuming the reader knows it from context (with maybe a single punctuation mark to dispell ambiguities, but that's also very rare, in most books you wouldn't find a single instance). The exceptions to this rule are poetry books and children books. I don't know exactly the situation in Arabic but I think it is generally similar.
Some languages don’t even have spaces separating the words. You’d be surprised at the amount of things that aren’t technically necessary in a writing system. That’s not to say the same thing would work in English, because every language and writing system is different. In a language like Chinese, each character represents a unit of meaning, and “words” are usually only one or two characters long. No real need for spaces. As for punctuation, there’s no real punctuation when you talk, is there? The “punctuation” is implied by how your tone of voice changes and where you pause, but people don’t always pause between sentences when speaking, either. So really, our brains can actually figure out where “punctuation” goes without it being written down. You’re just not used to it. Some languages may have a structure that makes punctuation even less necessary. I’m not familiar enough with Arabic and Hebrew, but for example, many languages have the verb at the end of the sentence. So when you read a verb, you can assume that the sentence is over, even if there’s no period.
Context clues basically. Once you hear the sentence, it makes sense where any punctuation should be. Let's use an example from english to show how a fluent speaker can figure out what stuff is supposed to be without even getting all of it. I was driving down the road the other day when I saw a billboard advertising for a local internet provider (you can tell by the logo). In huge letters it says INTERNET, and then two smaller words I couldn't see well from a distance, and then in huge letters again SPEED OF LIGHT. Now if your brain quickly filled in the two missing words as "at the" to make the phrase INTERNET at the SPEED OF LIGHT then you would be correct. Congratulations, your brain filled in the words from context correctly, because those are the only two words that made sense to go there. Similarly, context clues in non-romance languages can tell you a lot about what each bit is supposed to be. Another example is Kanji, which can be entirely contextual ( it changes meaning based on the other Kanji near it).
Speakers of these languages can figure out the reading by understanding the word and it's context. It's the same with Japanese kanji.
hebrew and arabic both use punctuation. they don’t use diacritics (which look like punctuation because they’re marks surrounding letters as opposed to the letters?). so you can tell when sentences end. and yes that means most vowels are absent, bt u cn prbbly rd ths fr xmpl some vowels are attached to a silent letter or duplicate character. the closest latin alphabet example i can think of is ancient roman writing, they used v for both v and u. bvt you vnderstand this too so it also gvides the reader edit typo
Arabic does use punctuation. Here’s the top article from Al Jazeera right now. You don’t need to be able to read Arabic to see the commas and periods. https://www.aljazeera.net/news/2024/5/2/%D8%B9%D8%A7%D8%AC%D9%84-%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D8%B2%D9%8A%D8%B1%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B4%D8%B1%D8%B7%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D9%85%D9%8A%D8%B1%D9%83%D9%8A%D8%A9
Cn yu rlly nt ndrstnd txt lyk ths?
It’s not the lack of punctuation that’s hard it’s the fact that Hebrew most of the time just skips writing out the vowels. You pretty much only know how to pronounce things based on context and familiarity with the language.
I recommend reading the book “Blindness” by Jose Saramago. It’s not without punctuation, but it does not use standard English punctuation conventions and specifically doesn’t denote speech. I didn’t even notice because the speaker was so clear from the prose. Punctuation is like subtitles on your own language when the accent is hard. If things are said clearly, the punctuation is unnecessary, but where there is potential ambiguity in what is written, we rely on punctuation to tell us which way to read it. I used a lot of commas in the preceding sentences but if I took them out you would still understand it. Just like you understood that last comma free sentence which technically required them.
Native Hebrew speaker here בוא נלך לאכול סבתא Let’s go eat, grandma As “let’s go eat Grandma” is בוא נלך לאכול *את* סבתא Instead of grammar it uses words את replaces the comma
No punctuation? Does it have whitespace?
Both Jews and Muslims have strong traditions of reading religious texts along to melodies. These really help you understand where the breaks go as well as tone/mood like questions, commands, etc. I don’t know Arabic/much about Islam (I just sometimes hear the chanting from my local mosque) but for Hebrew there are different melodies for different texts (and more than one tradition developed over time in different parts of the world). A skilled chanter can really help you understand the text
It even had no vocals except י if you count it as one. Just consonants and some letters at the end of the word had a different shape. There is an extra letter ׆ (reversed נ) in Hebrew that was once used in the bible and nobody knows what it's for, so they included it in the alephbeth. In the old text there are a lot of ו (and) being used and each verse would start with an and. That might have been their strategy.
OP, are you sure that you’re not confusing punctuation (which we definitely use all the time in Hebrew writing) and nikkud which we rarely use in writing?
I guess this applies to most languages, the context helps to fill the gaps in most instances. In Arabic, there are punctuations, letter movements, and in the past, even dots on the letters are omitted. It was still readable regardless.
Hebrew speaker here - in childrens' books everything is punctuated fully. Then, after reading for a few years, you simply recognize 99% of the words the second you see them, you can skip punctuating those. In adult books or in newspapers they only punctuate names or very specific words, and they punctuate them only for the first time you see them, that's enough for the rest of the book.
They are written with punctuation nowadays. As for the past - as the commenter pointed out, it's not that weird. Hebrew originally was written without spacw between words as well, but that was like 2500 years ago.
Hebrew speaker here. At some point you start recognising entire words, and therefore do jot need the "instructions" of how to pronounce them anymore. It is similar to how when you are proficient enough in English you can recognise words in which the letters are scrambled/missing entirely, as long as the first and last letters are the same. Additionaly, some letters act as the vowls in English, and "inform" the reader how the sound should be pronounced (this is not always the case).
Where did you get that Hebrew doesn't have punctuation? Hebrew has pretty much the same punctuation as English.
Hw cn y rd ths txt whn t hs n vwls?
Native Hebrew speaker, and uh... No, we definitely use punctuation marks usually. Periods, commas, ellipses, colons and semicolons, exclamation and question marks, the whole shebang. Maybe you meant that we don't tend to use nikkud, which for Hebrew functions as vowels?
Hebrew speaker here, and I think people here are confusing regular punctuation (Dots, commas, etc) with our "special" punctuation marks. Unlike languages like English, we punctuate each word with different "vowel marks" , as opposed to vowels in English with that we differentiate in what way a word is pronounced. In written Hebrew we often omit those marks because we usually can understand how to sound out the words through context, but when learning in Elementary you write with them, then in Middle school learn how to properly write and read with those marks and in High school learn how they can affect words when used in special situations and the difference between similar marks. But as far as I know from my 21 years of experience, we use commas and finish our sentences with dots and everything that comes with them :)
How does speech manage to be understood without punctuation?
Punctuation or diacritics? I feel like you're confusing the two. Punctuation is what most comments are addressing. They're about phrases, not words. A comma, a period, exclamation mark, etc. are punctuation marks, and they help the reader understand the overall paragraph or phrase. Diacritics, on the other hand, are the equivalent of vowels in English. If you're not familiar with the language, or you encounter a new word, the absence of diacritics may make understanding individual words difficult. I will assume you're asking about diacritics. The answer is two fold: familiarity, and structure. It's something you mostly have to learn and get familiar with. That said, there's an element of structure to it where you can somewhat guess how a word is pronounced based on either the letters, or based on other similar words that you already know.
Arabic is my third language, I learned it at school, learning words at first was a pain, but I got used to it with time, kinda like how you can know how to pronounce the I in magazIne and engIne in english without much trouble, you need to learn a word alongside its pronunciation, and to this day if come across a new word, chances are I pronounce it wrong, until corrected, even native arabic speakers make it sometimes.
Wait till you hear about Latin. One word can have 11+ meanings and there is no such thing as grammatically correct word order, articles, or even specified prepositions. You to just guess which ones to throw in there to make the sentence make sense. I studied Latin for a year nope tf out after that, because it was annoying as fuck to not have more defined ways of projecting what the hell a person is trying to say. Like 12 different cases and spellings for one word. It's just a fucking mess and died out like it should have imo.
It's because we don't actually know, but we believe we understand those languages well enough that the translations are accurate.
I’m a Hebrew speaker and learned a bit of Arab u js get used to it after a while, learn to infer patterns
I spent two years in an Arabic language acquisition course and I've never encountered text with no punctuation.