Things that Jews know: Are all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet hidden in the Star of David?

Nice to send a link for this video Demonstrating how all the letters of the Hebrew house of the alphabet are hidden in our Shield of David. And wondering if the Star of David is indeed adapted to the Holy language.

Fascinating indeed. What is illustrated most of all is our ability to create such a familiar pattern of "aleph" or "house" by combining lines even if they are very different from the standard letter we learned in first grade. Notice, for example, how different the letter M as it flashes in the 16th second of the video is from any familiar graphic representation of it and is still recognized as such. The brain looks for patterns and when it comes to letters, the business becomes extremely easy. Studies examining the focus of gaze in images have shown that the human face and text steal attention from any other element.

We will recognize the letters even when they are distorted, upside down or reflected in a mirror. What we need are mainly the nodes, that is, the meeting points between the lines that make up the letter. This ability is responsible for a tiny area - a few millimeters in the cortex of the left half of the brain that specializes in deciphering letters and words. Reading is a very new ability and evolution did not prepare us for it, the original purpose of that brain ability is probably the quick identification of important objects in the environment using characteristic outlines without the need to remember and reproduce details. Therefore, in the process of learning to write, knowing the shape of the letters is relatively easy, but mistakes of mirror writing are repeated. Children who confuse J and Z in the script can blame natural selection. In the environment in which our visual system evolved, it would be helpful if recognition of a body we saw from the north would be preserved even when we encountered it from the south. On the paper page we are required to look only from one direction and it is difficult for us to get used to it.

The letters, in any written language, are mainly an angular combination of line segments. This characteristic is not self-evident, he wrote brevity, for example it is much easier to scribble and it consists mainly of winding - wavy lines; Braille illustrates an elegant option for representing all letters and numbers as an arrangement of dots in cells. The fact that such possibilities were abandoned in every culture that put its language on paper, clay or stone indicates that the writing adapted itself to the ease of reading and not to the convenience of writing. Although we write to ourselves mainly in rounded script letters, for reading we prefer angular print letters. Thus, even though handwriting fonts are at our disposal in the word processor, their use is very rare. The shape of the typeface therefore has significance in understanding the preferences of the image processing system.

The researcher Mark Changizi went to the trouble and counted the number of lines required to write a letter in 114 different languages. It turns out that the differences are quite small: in almost every letter system, 3 sections are required on average for a letter (2.93 in Hebrew). Since the average number of letters in a word is 4-5, writing a word in a language made up of letters requires approximately the same number of lines used in sign languages ​​such as Chinese: it seems that the human brain is easy to quickly identify objects based on such a number of hallmarks. When you sort the different ways in which 1-3 segments can connect to each other to create a letter, you get no less than 36 possibilities (when you ignore non-consecutive letters represented in Hebrew by KOF and HA). In this way, the letters can be categorized according to these basic geometric characteristics (similar to the way typology treats three-dimensional bodies) without considering the relationship of length or the shape of the line (straight or curved). Emphasizing the junctions at the expense of the line is based on perception experiments showing that it is easier to recognize letters where middle segments are omitted than when the connections are deleted.

Two line segments can be connected in three ways:

1. End-end to receive an L (as in the Hebrew Rish)
2. Connecting the end to the middle as in a T (or Hebrew DLT)
3. Connection X which does not exist in the Hebrew alphabet.

When there are 3 segments in a letter, 32 connection options are obtained (combinations of L, T, and X. (There is no difference according to this method between the Latin F and Gimel, La'an, and the Hebrew sides (one L connection and one T connection in all these letters) or Between Z and KF (two combinations of L. Genghis studied the frequency of the basic forms in the writing methods and it turns out that the inventors of the letters mainly liked to create variations on L, T, Y, H and F, on the other hand, the ignoring of almost every combination that has more than an X node stands out One. According to the researcher, we are adapted to the identification of such shapes because they are common in the contours of objects in the natural environment. Analyzing photos of natural landscapes shows that it is indeed easy to locate L at almost all edge lines of objects, T is very common at meeting points and breaks and Y appears naturally at every vertex. It turns out that the prevalence of geometric elements in letters and other symbols follows the "natural" prevalence of graphics that our ancestors experienced and to which our image processing system adapted.

And how does all this relate to the Star of David and the miracle of letters?

In Hebrew segments do not intersect (there is no Latin X-like letter), there is no connection of 3 ends of segments at a point (as in Latin Y or Arabic i), there is no meeting between 2 ends and the middle of a segment (as in the letters B and K) and there is no segment connecting two middles of other segments e.g. H. In a system that consists of combinations of T and L there is no difficulty in building the letters from the segments of the Star of David. If you had tried the exercise with the familiar letters from English, you would not have been able to produce, for example, K. Why is Hebrew so poor in the form of the letters? What we call "Hebrew script" is actually an Assyrian script that replaced the original Hebrew script, a revolutionary change that tradition attributes to Ezra the scribe. It is possible that the typographical poverty of the Hebrew "our" reflects an early stage in the transition from engraving letters in clay or stone (as in cuneiform) to the use of ink on parchment or papyrus. The flexible means of writing made it possible to diversify the shape of the letters: adding junctions and connections that are difficult to engrave. The Hebrew script from the First Temple period was quite similar to the Phoenician script, the ancestor of the Greek script, from which later the Latin and Cyrillic letters also grew, and is richer in its geometry. "Vertical" - the first word in the first text written according to the Hebrew tradition - the tablets of the covenant contains 2 letters: קפ and יוד which cannot be matched to the Star of David.

The "Star of David" itself is a symbol whose connection to Judaism (outside the Prague community) is questionable, very new and was only established in the 19th century (which can also be said about the movement that signed this video).
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• Discovery: A writing hidden from view was revealed in fragments of buried scrolls
• Dozens of inscriptions from Samaria, the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Israel, were written by only two people - most likely scribes or officials of King Jeroboam ben Yoash mentioned in the book of XNUMX Kings
• Research: The Pentateuch of the Torah existed already in the days of the First Temple
• First: Archaeologists from the Hebrew University uncovered a certificate of laws written in the style of Hammurabi's laws