I dont know how they get 'dod' from 'dwd'
Basic Hebrew 101. The only disclaimer I should issue here is that I'm remembering this from my one year of studying Hebrew at university nearly 40 years ago.
The Hebrew alphabet consists only of consonants, including two silent letters which are pronounced differently from each other. It has no letters for vowels. Traditionally, you just knew which vowel sounds needed to be applied. Now that works when everytbody speaks and reads the language every day, but then Jewish communities were established in foreign lands where they no longer spoke Hebrew all the time. It is my understanding that such communities led to the system of
points, diacritical markings placed beneath the letters to indicate the vowels.
In the point system, the letter
vav could have one of three sounds:
1. As a
vav, sounding like a "v".
2. As a
kholem, sounding like a long "o", indicated by a dot above the
vav.
3. As a
shuru, sounding like a long "u" (as in Spanish or German, not a diphthong as in English), indicated by a dot midway up to the side of the
vav.
So, the three-letter word in question, daleth-vav-daleth, could have any one of three pronounciations, depending on which word you meant:
1. "David", being a man's name (my own name, BTW)
2. "dod", meaning "uncle"
3. "dud", meaning a pot.
So when my foreign-language-student friends had their first children (twins) and I became known as "Uncle David" to the boys, my friends would laughingly call me "Dod David". The joke being that both words ("Dod" and "David") are spelled exactly the same in Hebrew.
PS
This really is very basic knowledge of Hebrew. This would cast some doubt on your ability to understand linguistics, especially as historical linguistics applies to Hebrew, the primary language in question in these discussions.
Edited by dwise1, : PS
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