The Vowels — the layer the Masoretes added
The promise lesson one made
Lesson one taught the twenty-two consonants and said that the marks under and inside them came later. This is that story. For most of its life the Hebrew Bible was consonants only: a scribe wrote ברא and a reader who knew the language supplied the vowels aloud. Between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries, scribal families known as the Masoretes — the Ben Asher line at Tiberias above all — wrote the spoken tradition into the page so it could not be lost. The Lantern's Hebrew is the Leningrad text, the oldest complete manuscript of that work, finished in 1008.
The vowels themselves
Nine signs carry almost everything. A vowel point is not a letter and cannot stand alone, so here is each one riding on a bet, the second letter of the alphabet. Under the letter: בָ qamets (a, as in father), בַ patach (a, short), בֵ tsere (e, as in they), בֶ segol (e, as in bed), בִ chiriq (i, as in machine), בֻ qubuts (u), and בְ shewa — the half-vowel, a hurried uh, or nothing at all. Above the letter: בֹ holam (o). And after it: בוּ shureq, a vav with a dot in its belly, (u). The sign is read after the consonant it sits under, which is why בְ is be and not eb — the letter first, then its vowel, still right to left.
Two marks that are not vowels
A dot inside a letter is a dagesh, and it does one of two jobs: it hardens a letter (ב with a dagesh is b, without it v — the difference between bet and vet), or it doubles it. A dot above a letter's right or left shoulder is the shin/sin dot from lesson one, which decides whether שׁ says sh or שׂ says s. Neither is a vowel; both are pointing, and both were added by the same hands.
A third layer: the singing marks
Look at any word on this site and you will see marks that are neither vowels nor dots — small hooks and wedges above and below. Those are the te'amim, the cantillation accents. They mark the stressed syllable, they chant the verse, and above all they punctuate it: they say which words bind together and where the sentence breaks. They are why a Hebrew verse can be read aloud correctly by someone who has never seen it before, and they are a third distinct layer of the Masoretes' work. The stray vertical stroke you will also meet — ֽ meteg, as in הָאָֽרֶץ, the last word of Genesis 1:1 — is a fourth: a secondary-stress mark.
One word, taken apart
בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית, the first word of the Bible. Six letters — bet, resh, aleph, shin, yod, tav — and that is all the ancient scribe wrote. Six marks were added on top: a shewa and a dagesh in the bet, a tsere under the resh, a chiriq under the shin, the shin's own dot, and a tipcha, an accent, floating under the shin as well. Read the letters and you get brʾšyt. Read the marks with them and you get be-re-shit, stress on the last syllable: in a beginning. Everything the site's transliteration column shows you — be.re.Shit — is the second layer talking.
The Name, and why it is pointed strangely
יְהוָה is the four consonants yod-he-vav-he, the Name, and it carries the vowels of a different word. The Masoretes never altered a consonant, so where the reading tradition said one thing and the letters said another they wrote the consonants of the one and the vowels of the other: a ketiv, what is written, and a qere, what is read. The Name is the standing case — pointed to prompt the reader to say Adonai, Lord, instead. This is not a footnote on this site. The Lantern's word data transliterates it Yahweh; the Lantern Direct prints the LORD throughout, pending the divine-name ruling docs/10 still owes; and the corpus keeps the Qere stream alongside the Leningrad one rather than choosing for you. The vowel points are the reason all three of those things can be true at once.
Why it matters on this site
Tap any Hebrew word in the reader and the panel names its grammar in full — יְהִ֣י at Genesis 1:3 is a qal jussive, third person masculine singular, which is why the Direct renders it "Let there be" and the Vulgate renders it fiat. You could not ask that question of an unpointed text. The vowels are what turn a string of consonants into a form with a tense, a person and a mood, and the whole apparatus this site is built on rests on the layer this lesson is about.
The words themselves
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