Hmm. That’s the Hebrew Aleph-Bet, or Alef-Bet, if you’re going to be picky, and if you’re going to be picky you won’t be satisfied with the standard answer of 22.

If I told  you to make a series of letters to convey all of God’s message to humanity, or at least to Jewmanity, do you think you could do it with 22? And by the way, two of them are silent. Maybe three.

Okay, the silent letters in the Hebrew alphabet (using the English word for the series of letters) are aleph and ayin. Now, a shin with the dot on the left is a sin, but a dot on the right makes it a shin (unless you are one of the Ephraimites with some kind of speech impediment who can’t pronounce the sh sound in shibolet (Judges 12:5-6), but they all got killed off, I guess, which left only Hebrew-speakers who could say shibolet). But what is the sound of a shin without any dot, as in Issachar (יִשָּׂשכָר)?

But wait: if the dots here and there make shin and sin separate letters because the sound is different, how about the dots inside all those other letters? No, no, you can’t claim to have another letter just because the sound is different!

Nor can you claim to have two separate letters just because their shape is different. You have five final letters in Hebrew; you can’t add them to the 22, can you? Look the English E and e: two different shapes, one name, so one letter out of 26. If you added all the English capital letters, you’d have to say there are 52 letters, and we all know that’s not true.

The Hebrew shin and sin have two names, but we ignore the difference and count one letter.

There’s a letter in the Thai alphabet that changes the tone of the following consonant. This letter has a shape, a name, no sound, but it does something. Turkish has an i without a dot; the sound is like i in sir–is that a sixth vowel, or no vowel at all? In English, the g in tough doesn’t sound like the g in age or grow.

My teachers promised me that Hebrew was phonetic, that the letters wouldn’t confuse me, that it all made sense. Maybe I misunderstood them, though I was a dutiful and timorous student, given to tears at moments of adversity. Maybe they lied.

Even the Rabbis of the Talmud had to wonder about aleph and ayin. How come a word sometimes uses an ayin and sometimes an aleph, they wondered (BT Shabbat 77a-b).

I’m glad I don’t have to face a class of Hebrew school students and teach them the letters.

It’s getting more and more difficult to count letters in an alphabet. The shape doesn’t matter. The name doesn’t matter. The sound doesn’t matter. What matters, then? Is the answer (roll of drums, thoughts of Tevye) TRADITION?

Please, no, don’t tell me so!