Popular Hebrew Script
& Authentic Pronunciation

Written for the second look.

You have seen the Hebrew alphabet a thousand times. This book was written for multiple levels and also for the second look—the one where you notice a four-headed shin embossed on Tefillin and realize no textbook ever mentioned it. Where you ask why your grandfather's taw sounded like an "s" and your teacher's does not, and where you wonder whether the pronunciation you were taught is the tradition or only the survivor.

A drawing manual and a font menu.
Each letter is taught stroke by stroke—and then shown in its whole family of shapes: Ashkenazi and Sephardi Stam, Rashi, Vilna, Solitreo, David, and the everyday handscripts, gathered on one page so the eye can compare instead of guess.
 

On a string of pearls.
Each letter arrives with a saying from Mivchar HaPeninim, the classic "Choice of Pearls"—so that no letter is met alone. It comes inside a sentence worth copying.

A double life for every letter.
Two faces, two pages. The A-page: the modern pronunciation, plainly described, as spoken today. The B-page: the mining operation—down through the Rishonim, Saadya Gaon, Sefer Yetzirah, and the living reading traditions recorded by Bension Kohen of Djerba, in search of the authentic sound. Not what the letter has become, but what it was—and where it is still alive. Each distinctive phoneme is anchored in examples from several languages so that a reader of any background begins from a sound he already owns.

Recovering the forgotten letters. 

The four-headed shin · pe kefula · taw & saw · ghimel & rimel · daleth & thaleth · final kaf and the only vowels it can carry · six pages on resh—the seventh doubled letter, with dagesh qal and dagesh hazaq, which most grammars quietly dropped · Bonus: visual rosettes that make the laws of dagesh qal and hazaq graspable at a glance.

A suite of pangrams. {the whole alphabet in a sentence.}
See and practice sentences for the Hebrew & English handscripts so that the letters leave the charts and present the whole alphabet straight in a model sentence.

The detective story.
A 180-page investigation into what happened to the phonetic Ashkenazi mesorah—pursued through genetics, history, geography, manuscripts and archaeology, oral traditions and plain logic—and the case, laid out fact by fact. Perceive unique advantages building up for the Sephardi tradition in pronunciation and halacha. Readers may not agree with every page. Still they will not be able to say the case was not made or that the inconvenient evidence was left out.

For the calligrapher, the baal koreh, the student of Hebrew at any level, the teacher who has run out of answers, and every reader who suspects that an alphabet and a logic this old are worthy of deeper attention and that the liturgy needs the genuine pronunciation. A foundational reference, at last.

The twenty-two letters are generally presented on a page or two in contemporaneous manuals. Thus the problems are discarded and bypassed. All the complexities of various alphabets, shapes, phonetic realizations, and functional meanings are quietly squashed away for decades already. It is well due time to upgrade the Hebrew to its Yehudith status. Even if... {the officials on the wall beg Ravshakeh not to speak [יְהוּדִית] in the people's hearing—2 Kings 18:26}

There are more than twenty-two, if you know where to look "…to restore Hebrew to what the Tanakh itself calls it: Yehudith, the language of Yehuda." You can find in this book more than a page or two. You get more than 90 dedicated pages on the issue directly. Plus the essential introductions and explanations, forging a reference volume of 376 pages. The distillation of the present book took more than seven years in research and editing.

[סוֹמֵךְ נוֹפְלִים]
What was falling out of the world is held up by hands that never let go. You can become one of those hands... that used to belong to the great grandfathers and past generations, whose voices went quiet too soon. This book is how you become one of them.