See v. 1

Interjection: ashray/blessed

Begin reading your Hebrew text (Bible—Psalm 119:1) from right to left. The first word is

Alephbet/Alphabet: Practice

(pronounced ashray). The first letter is aleph (know your alephbet--if you haven't already looked through it, begin now). The aleph in this case is a consonant with a vowel underneath it: _ pattack, see Ges. § 8a1. The aleph with the pattack vowel makes the syllable sound like “ah”.

The second letter is a sheen; it makes a “sh” sound like in “shoe” or “wish”. The sheen has a silent sheva : underneath it. It is a syllable divider, a silent stop in this case--see Ges. § 10. The syllable made is the result of the “sh” sound added to the “ah” sound, making “ash”. That is the first syllable.

Now we will go to the second syllable. It begins with resh, a consonant. Resh makes a sound like an “r” at times, but many times not. In this case it has the vowel tsayray .. underneath it. See Ges. § 8b3. It also has a conjunctive (“joining”--it joins the first word to the word following it—you can tell by the direction of the marks), accent mark “mayreha”. See Ges.§15f, 16a. The resh with the tsayray underneath makes the sound “ray”. The letter yud following

is an auxiliary vowel, a vowel lengthener. See Ges. § 8b1. Together, the resh with its vowel, followed by the yud , makes a syllable and sounds like “ray”. You can hear the word now. It is the first word in the sound clip: Sound.

Part Of Speech: Interjection

Ges. § 30, s; § 105, syntax of § 148

Ps. 119:1

Look at the Hebrew word for “blessed”. It is pronounced ashray. It is an interjection. The first part of the verse is translated “Blessed are the perfect in the way,”.