Combined Aramaic Vowels

This series of web pages provides free lessons on the Aramaic Vowels. Previous lessons looked at the Aramaic Alphabet.

Home | Learning Aramaic | Aramaic Vowels | Combined Aramaic Vowels

You have now met all of the Aramaic Vowels. The same vowels are used in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) as well as Modern Hebrew.

We looked at Shva in the previous lesson. On occasions, Shva can occur under one of the four ‘gutturals’ of the Aramaic language (

and

). When this happens, the Shva makes it very difficult to pronounce because a guttural is not easy to articulate so close to another letter (as would normally happen with Shva). To make the word easier to pronounce, a Shva under one of these Aramaic letters always occurs with one of the vowels Patah, Segol or Kamets. The Shva occurs along with the usual vowel, and is pronounced with a short half-vowel.

As an example, here is the Aramaic letter Alap

with each of the combined Aramaic vowels in turn:

Shva and Segol together

Shva and Patah together

Shva and Kamets together

These combined vowels often occur at the start of a word. Here are a few common examples from the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible):

God, Elohim (2606)

that, which (4838)

I (13)

God, Adonai, Lord (335)

Home | Learning Aramaic | Aramaic Vowels | Combined Aramaic Vowels