Limmud Oz 2021

Half the world's population uses variants of the Alphabet, developed by Hebrew-Canaanites languages, which has made it possible for ordinary people to learn to write, each letter representing a particular sound. That common heritage is evident from the order of the letters in these scripts. The 3rd letter of the Hebrew Alphabet is Gimmel, equivalent to Greek Gamma; then why is the 3rd letter of English a “C”, not a “G”? If each letter represented a specific sound, why do the 6 Hebrew letters listed above have variant forms, with or without a daghesh, a dot in the middle of the letter? Jewish communities have had different traditions pronouncing the variants of these letters, according to whether or not they are written with a daghesh: Ashkenazi communities distinguish between the pronunciation of בּ and ב, Sephardi communities don't. Sephardi communities differentiated between גּ and ג, but Ashkenazis didn't. Let's learn together: why is it so?