Saturday, August 23, 2014

MNEMONIC HEBREW history

Why are you learning Hebrew? Is it because you seek to grow closer to Ha5em? Is it because you have heard of the success and purity of this amazing language? Hebrew is one of the few languages to have a university to guide it, the only language lucky enough to be dead for two thousand years, sleeping, waiting to be revived. The only language with a linguistic anchor (the Torah) that keeps it pure. But while all this is truly something to celebrate, there is a dark side. And you realize it almost immediately after learning the 4alefbeyt. Despite having only 22 letters, there is immense incompatibility transliterating. It has sounds that don't exist in English, is written right to left and without vowels, and a single letter can represent a few sounds. It is compact by nature and this causes difficulty to the learner. The vowels are incompatible with western technology such as Facebook. Express this to your fellow Hebrewist and you can guarantee to be labelled lazy or radical. However, this issue is unique to all Semitic languages. Such as Arabic which has letters that change depending on their position in a word and Amharic with over 200 letters. How do they adapt?

The answers lies with the cellphone. When the cellphone was first introduced to the middle East, it was introduced with our familiar 26 letter Latin alphabet. Arabs quite simply had to learn English in order to text. The educated would flaunt their abilities. Eventually a few Arabs, armed with their God given Semitic common sense, adapted. For letters that didn't exist in English, the hindu-arabic numerals (0-9) were used. Unfortunately different systems are used in every Arab country. This is not so with Hebrew. There is only one system which will be introduced and utilized through out MNEMONIC HEBREW material.

Being burdened by clumsy writing systems is not new. Take for instance the Koreans which struggled for centuries with Chinese characters that only made sense to the Chinese. Until a faithful king created Hangul, an elegant writing alphabet that freed his people and unlocked their potential. Consider students of Chinese, who also use hindu-Arabic numerals in a system called pinyin to represent tones.

The gift you will be given is the ability to freely type or text in Hebrew with a system that will not burden you with ambiguity. A system compatible with all Hebrew media. You will now be able to copy and paste Hebrew literature on Facebook WITH VOWELS along side English translation. However, there is a warning, after using this system you will cringe every time you see a clumsy transliteration like 'boker tov', which gives you hardly any clue as to it's root or true Hebrew spelling. Instead you will learn to appreciate boqer 9ov-good morning. Let's be absolutely honest with ourselves, the amibiguous transliteration and the incompatible vowel pointings are both as useless to those outside of Israel as an ash tray on a motorcycle.

You will not need to download any special fonts, you will not have to combine letters to represent sounds like the Anglo h convention found in the word 'she'. You will be totally free from the shift key. You can stop pushing that square wheeled wheelbarrow(ambiguous transliteration, vowelless writing, and clumsy vowels) up a hill. All that will be required is to memorize the sounds of our 6 faithful Hero's: 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 & 9.

If you are a native Hebrew speaker that for some reason feels offended by what is written here, I have this to say, your language is beautiful, it transcends nationalism and is a gift for everyone. You do not have a right to burden myself or anyone. Mnemonic Hebrew is faithful to Hebrew spelling and root system. Do not be so closed minded as to think using numbers as letters is a sin. It is the most Hebraic thing in the world!

With that being said, Here are our six faithful hero's!

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