The above comparisons are approximations that don't necessarily correspond 100% with each other. These are the letters of the two scrips and how they correspond: Arabic letter The reason that the Hebrew language lacks the guttural sounds present in Arabic might be because of the fact that, before the revival of Hebrew, the Hebrew language was mostly a liturgical language studied by Jews in Europe, and not a language spoken a lot in everyday situations.ĭialectal Arabic on the other hand, has been continuously spoken as an everyday language (in its colloquial forms) by native speakers since the language came about and thereby preserving more aspects of its pronunciation In Hebrew, these vowels are a, e i, o and u, whereas Arabic only uses a, i and u. The vowels in both Arabic and Hebrew exist in long and short forms. While Arabic has a few more consonants, with the addition of some guttural sounds that don't exist in Modern Hebrew, the Hebrew language has two more vowels than Arabic. In Arabic and Hebrew, vowel sounds are instead marked with diacritics (in historical and religious texts) or without vowels at all (in all other texts). An abjad, unlike an alphabet doesn't have static letters for vowels. They are both written from right to left, and they're both 'abjads'. Hebrew's 22 letters correspond more or less to 22 of Arabic's 28 letters. The reason for this difference might be that the Arabic script didn't develop directly from Aramaic, but took a detour by first developing into the Nabataean script, which looks like a more stringent form of Arabic.īut while the Hebrew and the Arabic alphabets look different, they have a lot in common. Arabic is cursive and wavy, whereas the Hebrew script seems more geometric.

Today, Hebrew and Arabic writing look quite different, though. They both evolved from the Aramaic alphabet, an alphabet which existed some 2800 years ago. The Hebrew and and the Arabic scripts are related.

The Hebrew And Arabic Alphabets (Abjads) And How They're Pronounced Talk In Arabic (excellent resource for most varieties of Arabic).HebrewPod101 (best Hebrew resource by far).Tip: For learning Arabic or Hebrew, I recommend these two resources:

To give you an idea about the differences between the two languages, I'll try looking into some of the things that make the two languages both similar and unique. They're close, but they're not that close. A good comparison could be that of German and English, or perhaps French and Romanian. Centuries, if not millennia separate the two tongues which have developed in each one their own direction. While the two languages show a clear common ancestry when you look at the vocabulary, the pronunciation, and grammatical structures, Arabic and Hebrew aren't mutually intelligible. (That's Judaism and Islam, in case you've been living under a rock!)Īnd finally, in a way, they were both considered dead languages until very recently being revived by linguists to enter into a new and flourishing role in the world.īut how similar are Arabic and Hebrew really? They're the two most well-known languages in the Middle-East and they're both the liturgical languages of two important world religions. Arabic and Hebrew are two languages from the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family.

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