The General Shape-Categories of the Letters of the Alephbet (The Hebrew Alphabet)
Three straight line letters י ו ן
sometimes with a 'half roof' as pictured here, and one with a
full roof, with or without a zigzag: ז
Three letters open to the left: ב כ נ
Two letters open only downward: ת ח
Two somewhat more complex variations of this shape: ה ק
Two simple-shaped closed letters םסand three
more-complexly-shaped letters almost totally closed: one open to the
side, one to the top, a third to the bottom: פטמ
Three letters with the basic form ר in them: ר ך ד
Five letters with a v type shape somewhere within them: ץ א ג ע צ
Two long letters with various shapes: ל ף
One letter with three spokes: ש
Now quickly scan the letters below; soon they will look a little less forbidding:
א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ך ל מ ם נ ן ס ע פ ף צ ץ ק ר ש ת
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Lesson #1:
The Three Letters with the Simplest Shapes - Straight Lines
Next to each other the three look like this: יון
These are three separate letters of the aleph-bet. As we shall learn,
this combination of three letters actually spells a word in Hebrew.
Note: Hebrew is read from right to left, so the first letter of the word is the small one, the last letter is the long one.
This is the word in Hebrew for the country “Greece” (or its progenitor) and appears in Genesis.
Since the ancient Greek philosophers occupied themselves much with
aesthetics, with geometry, and with mathematical progressions, it is
fitting that an aesthetic combination of parallel lines of
progressively greater length should represent the word for Greece!
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In English, "I" is both a letter and a word. Similarly, the straight
line letter above – (the one that is neither long nor short) - is
not only a letter, it is also the Hebrew word for “and”.
The word “and” in Hebrew is written as part of the word it
refers to - simply adding the straight-line letter to the beginning of
a word x turns it into “and x”, or more precisely "andx".
"And Greece" would be one word, "AndGreece" . Remember that Hebrew is
read from right to left, and so the "and" is added on the right, so
we'd have something like "eceerGdnA", and so in Hebrew "and
(the progenitors of) Greece” is written as ויון (ie
“and יון ")
בני יפת גמר ומגוג ומדי ויון ותבל ומשך ותירס. Gen: (10:4)
ובני יון
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. Gen (10:2)
Notice the name Magog in that passage - this is one half of the famous
“Gog and Magog” of the prophetic vision of pre-messianic
apocalyptic war [ref: ]
Seeing these letters in different Fonts
Imagine convincing someone unfamiliar with our alphabet that the
following letters are all the same, and that they are easily
recognizable as the same letter:
ffff
[need to fix fonts here]
See how different f looks in different font styles? Yet to you they are
clearly the same letter because you know how to distinguish between the
essential characteristic of the letter and the contribution of the
font. In different fonts the Hebrew letters will also look quite
different: we will need to learn to recognize the underlying similarity
and ignore the differences due to fonts.
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