أم القراءة

في تهجي العبرية وبعض اللغات السامية الأخرى، أم القراءة (matres lectionis ؛ بالإنگليزيةالنطق: /ˈmeɪtriːz lɛktiˈoʊnᵻs/؛ من اللاتينية "أمهات القراءة"، ومفردها: mater lectionis، بالعبرية: אֵם קְרִיאָה‎)، تشير إلى استخدام حروف ساكنة معينة لبيان حرف متحرك. الحروف التي تقوم بذلك في العبرية هي <א> aleph, <ה> he, <ו> حرف (أو vav) و <י> yod (أو yud). The yod and waw in particular are more often vowels than they are consonants. وفي اللغة العربية، فإن أمهات القراءة (though they are much less often referred to thus) are alif <ا>, waw <و>, and ya' <ي>.

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 استعراض

لأن الأبجديات المستخدمة في كتابة بعض اللغات السامية تفتقد الحروف المتحركة، فإن قراءة النصوص بوضوح يصبح صعباً في كثير من الأحيان. Therefore, to indicate vowels (mostly long), 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 بيت ("house"), which is spelled the same, the same letter represents a genuine consonant. أمهات القراءة توجد في الأبجديات الأوغاريتية والمؤابية والعربية الجنوبية والفينيقية، ولكنهم يُستخدمون على نطاق واسع في العبرية والآرامية والسريانية والعربية.

 الأصول والتطور

Historically, the practice of using matres lectionis seems to have originated when /aj/ and /aw/ diphthongs, written with the yod י and the waw ו consonant letters respectively, monophthongized to simple long vowels /eː/ and /oː/. This epiphenomenal association between consonant letters and vowel sounds was then seized upon and used in words without historic diphthongs.

 العبرية

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 at the end of words, and י and ו were used mainly to write the original diphthongs /aw/ and /aj/ as well as original vowel+[y]+vowel sequences (which sometimes simplified to plain long vowels). 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 (Hebrew) or plene (Latin), 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 (niqqud) (diacritic symbols indicating vowel pronunciation and other important phonological features not written by the traditional basic consonantal orthography) 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. وبالمثل في العصور الوسطى، Ashkenazi Jews tended to use malē spellings under the influence of اللغات الأوروبية، but Sephardi Jews tended to use ḥaser spellings بتأثير من العربية.

 العربية

In Arabic there is no such 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 borrowed words into Arabic is usually done using matres lectionis in place of diacritics, even when the latter is more suitable 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.

Informal orthographies of spoken varieties of Arabic also use ha to indicate a shorter version of alif, a usage augmented by the ambiguity of the use of ha و التاء المربوطة in formal Arabic orthography. It is a formal orthography in other languages that use Arabic script, such as الأبجديات الكردية.

 السريانية

Syriac-Aramaic vowels are classified into three groups: the Alap (ܐ), the waw (ܘ), and the yod (ܝ). The mater lectionis was developed as early as the 6th century to represent long vowels, which were earlier denoted by a dot under the line. The most frequent ones are the yod and the waw, while the alap is mostly restricted to some transliterated words.

 الاستخدام في العبرية

للمزيد من المعلومات: التهجي العبري

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 (unlike in Aramaic and Arabic), but it is occasionally used to indicate an a vowel. (However, a silent aleph, indicating an original glottal stop consonant sound that has become silent in Hebrew pronunciation, can occur after almost any vowel.) At the end of a word, He ה can also be used to indicate that a vowel a should be pronounced.

الأمثلة:

الرمز	الاسم		Vowel formation	Vowel quality	مثال
	التوراتية	الحديثة			العبرية	النسخ الحرفي
א	Alef		ê, ệ, ậ, â, ô	mostly ā	פארן	Paran
ה	He		ê, ệ, ậ, â, ô	mostly ā or e	לאה	ليا
					משה	موشيه
ו	Waw	Vav	ô, û	ō or ū	יואל	Yo'el
					ברוך	باروخ
י	Yod	Yud	î, ê, ệ	ī, ē or ǣ	אמיר	Amir

 التأثير على اللغات الأخرى

Later, in some adaptations of the Arabic alphabet (such those sometimes used for Kurdish and Uyghur) and of the Hebrew alphabet (such as those used for the Yiddish and Ladino languages), matres lectionis were generally used for all or most vowels, thus in effect becoming vowel letters: see Yiddish orthography. This tendency was taken to its logical conclusion in fully alphabetic scripts such as the Greek, Roman and Cyrillic alphabets. Many of the vowel letters in such languages historically go back to matres lectionis in the Phoenician script. For example, the letter ⟨i⟩ was originally derived from the consonant letter yod. Similarly the vowel letters in Avestan were adapted from matres lectionis in the version of the Aramaic script used for Pahlavi.

 انظر أيضاً

• Hebrew spelling
• Niqqud
• Ktiv male
• Mappiq
• Tiberian vocalization
• Tengwar

 الهامش

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 ببليوگرافيا

• قالب:Cite GHG
• Garr, W. Randall. 1985. Dialect Geography of Syria-Palestine, 1000-586 B.C.E. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Jensen, Hans. 1970. Sign Symbol and Script. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Transl. of Die Schrift in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften. 1958, as revised by the author.
• Naveh, Joseph. 1979. Die Entstehung des Alphabets. Transl. of Origins of the Alphabet. Zürich und Köln. Benziger.
• Sass, Benjamin. 1991. Studia Alphabetica. On the origin and early history of the Northwest Semitic, South Semitic and Greek alphabets. CH-Freiburg: Universitätsverlag Freiburg Schweiz. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.