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