Twenty-Two Letters, No Vowels of Their Own

Hebrew is an abjad, a script in which every one of its twenty-two letters represents a consonant sound and vowels are not written as letters at all in the traditional consonantal text. Where a reader needs the vowels marked explicitly, most commonly in scripture intended for liturgical reading or for teaching, a separate system of points called niqqud is added beneath, above and inside the consonant letters, a system that developed considerably later than the consonantal alphabet itself, standardised by Masoretic scholars in the first millennium CE working to preserve the correct traditional pronunciation of biblical Hebrew.

This consonant only structure is what Hebrew shares with its close relatives Arabic and the older Phoenician script it and they all ultimately descend from, and it stands in contrast to the Greek alphabet's innovation of writing vowels as full letters of their own; a fluent reader of an unpointed Hebrew text supplies the vowels from context and familiarity with the language, in much the way an experienced reader of English shorthand or heavily abbreviated text reconstructs missing letters, rather than reading them directly off the page.