Reading the Masoretic vowel pattern
Biblical Hebrew is written with consonants, and the vowels live in the nikud — the dots and dashes the Masoretes added to fix the pronunciation. This tool reads pointed Hebrew text, identifies every vowel mark, and names it with its transliteration and quality, so you can study the vowel pattern of a word or verse at a glance.
The Tiberian niqqud system
The Masoretes of Tiberias developed their vowel-pointing system between roughly the 7th and 10th centuries CE. They used several categories of mark:
Long vowels:
- Qamatz (ָ) — long “a” as in “father”
- Tsere (ֵ) — long “e”
- Hiriq gadol (ִי) — long “i” with a yod
Short vowels:
- Patah (ַ) — short “a”
- Segol (ֶ) — short “e”
- Hiriq (ִ) — short “i”
- Qibbutz (ֻ) — short “u”
- Holam (ֹ) — “o” (actually a long vowel despite sometimes being called short)
Reduced vowels (hataf):
- Hataf patah (ֲ) — ultra-short “a”
- Hataf segol (ֱ) — ultra-short “e”
- Hataf qamatz (ֳ) — ultra-short “o”
Sheva (ְ): either silent (at end of syllable) or vocal (ultra-short before a consonant cluster).
The dagesh dot inside a letter and the mappiq dot in a final he are also nikud code points but mark consonantal features, not vowels.
How it works
Hebrew text is a sequence of base consonants (U+05D0 to U+05EA) interleaved with combining vowel marks (mostly U+05B0 to U+05BB, plus qamatz qatan at U+05C7). The tool walks the string code point by code point, separates consonants from marks, and looks up each mark in a table of the Tiberian niqqud:
בְּרֵאשִׁית
ב + sheva + dagesh
ר + tsere
א
שׁ + hiriq
י
תEach distinct vowel point is reported once with its count, and the dagesh is flagged separately because it marks gemination rather than a vowel. The summary tallies consonants versus vowel points.
Practical applications
Language learners use the analyzer to check whether a word follows the expected vowel pattern for its morphological class — for example, a qal active participle should have a holam and a tsere in a predictable position.
Textual scholars comparing manuscript traditions look for vowel variants. When a text uses qamatz qatan (a separate Unicode point) rather than plain qamatz, the tool reports it distinctly, which can matter for interpreting kethib-qere pairs.
Liturgical readers and cantors preparing trope (trop, cantillation) for Torah reading sometimes count vowel types to understand syllable structure before marking their personal tikkun.
Notes and example
The default text is בְּרֵאשִׁית (bereshit, the first word of Genesis), which shows sheva, dagesh, tsere, and hiriq together — a useful multi-vowel demonstration in just one word. Qamatz and qamatz qatan share a glyph but differ in sound; the tool distinguishes them only when the text uses the dedicated Unicode qamatz qatan code point (U+05C7). Unpointed texts have no vowel marks to analyze — the tool requires pointed (voweled) text to produce meaningful output.