the Berasit Hebrew Dictionary

It is often stated that ancient Hebrew contained no vowels. This is quite incorrect. The following four vowels are found widespread throughout the ancient Hebrew lexicon.

In English, we are accustomed to using five primary vowels; A, E, I, O, U. The four Hebrew vowels do not quite align with ours, but there do exist some parallels as seen in the above table.

The most straightforward of the Hebrew vowels is י (named 'yud'). It is essentially the same as the English letter 'i', though its sound leans closer toward an “ee” or “eey” sound.

The letter ו (named 'vav') represents the consonant “v” in modern Hebrew but also represents the vowels sounds “u” and “o”.¹⁾ Even so, these patterns should not be thought of as rules and it is quite easy to find examples which “break the rules”.

Take the word “Elohim” for example. Based on the well-known pronunciation, we should expect to find a ו in the word, to make the “o” sound. In a minority of instances this does in fact occur, but in the vast majority of instances, “elohim” is spelled אלהים leaving out the ו, so it technically should be pronounced “elehim”, however, the word begins with a letters א (named 'aleph'), so it should really be pronounced “alehim”. These kind of spelling and pronunciation problems occur all throughout the texts, affecting the majority of Hebrew words, and often foiling the work of the translator who seeks a consistent application of meaning to a consistent base of words. See Hebrew Spelling Inconsistencies

The letters א (named 'aleph') and ע (named 'ayin') represent “a” sounds, both short and long. In actual fact, the differences between these two sounds may be less important than one might imagine, due to the distinction only having arisen after the Biblical period, as discussed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Hebrew#Phonology, and particularly as affected by the so-called “Canaanite Shift” which occurred roughly contemporaneous with the Patriarchal to Mosaic periods. Essentially, what this means is that there are many cases where the sounds are interchangeable as far as semantics goes. It is essentially different accent but does not alter the meaning. See A vs E

Thus it can be seen that the ancient Hebrew language does contain vowels, but perhaps not as many as a modern English speaker would like. This highlights the fact that there is actually an extra “invisible vowel”. When two consonants are not separated by a vowel explicitly, it should be assumed that a “short e” or “eh” sound is implied. Therefore, in the end, it slightly true that Hebrew is “missing” vowels, but it is really only the “e” that it missing.

These vowels are further defined under our new transliterative alphabet system.