OBaRISH [obareesh] is a free transliteral and partly transcriptional fusion font of Ancient Hebrew (Ancient OBaRIT [obareet]) and English. It shows how the English alphabet, numbers and other Western type-characters are strikingly similar in appearance to the pictographic Ancient Hebrew alphabet—more than any other characters in use on Earth today—including those of the Modern Jewish Hebrew square script! OBaRISH is ideal for familiarising oneself with the pictographic Ancient Hebrew alphabet as portrayed in Jeff A Benner's "Semitic Early" Font; and transcribingHebrew words into English.


How I Compiled this Chart
OBaR [obar] (H5677) means Eber. OBaR is the son of SHaLaCH (ika Salah) and father of PaLaG (ika peleg), and his name means, “Cross: The crossing over or passing through a land or water to gain access to the side beyond” (AHLB#: 2520). OBaRI (H5680) means “Hebrew” (CHES, CLV, AV, and YLT); or “OBaR working”: the character of OBaR (the man) working (throughout space and time [through his descendants (both bloodline and spiritual)]. A default “a” [ah] has been inserted between consonants (B and R) in order to pronounce both OBaR and OBaRI—Ancient Hebrew (as well as Paleo Hebrew, and some early Modern Jewish Hebrew) was not written with vowel-points.
In Modern Jewish Hebrew OBaRI is said as [ib-ree], written as עברי — and given by the letters: ayin-bet-resh-yod (right to left). However in Ancient Hebrew its letters are ON-BaT-RaSH-ID (right to left); and in Ancient Hebrew the letter ON (ayin) was always an O with an [oh] sound. Paleo Hebrew had an "O"—shaped letter equivalent to ON.
IT [eet] means language. In this suffixal case: the pictograph of a hand and arm named ID (ika yod) means “working”, and the pictograph of two crossed sticks named TA (ika tav) means “marker”. Combined these make: “working marker”, “signs: written (pictorially), and verbal”, “language”, “number”, “measurement”, or, “ration”.
The word OBaRISH is formed from all the letters in the word OBaRI and the "ISH" in "English" The letter "I" is common to both OBaRI and English.
For how the Upper and Lower Case Transliteral OBaRISH letters evolved out of Ancient OBaRIT see the article entitled, Evolution of the English Alphbet Chart.
The numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9 evolved straight out of the Ancient OBaRIT alphabet specifically from the letters AL (1), BaT (2), GaM (3), DaL (4), EA (5), UU (6), ZaN (7), CHaTS (8) and THaTH (9)—and not from Arabic! The Standard Jewish Hebrew gematraic (numerical) value of the Modern Jewish Hebrew letters equivalent to these nine Ancient OBaRIT letters helps confirm the relationship between English numbers and Ancient OBaRIT letters.
The number 0 evolved from the round-shaped seed (not baby root [radicle]) of the Ancient OBaRIT sprouting seed letter named NaN (equivalent to nun in Modern Jewish Hebrew). In ancient Egypt the sprouting seed represented the beginning of something, especially life. The Ancient OBaRI word for seed is ZaRO (H2233) given by the Ancient OBaRIT letters ZaN-RaSH-ON: equivalent to the Modern Jewish Hebrew letters zayin-resh-ayin. We get our English word ZERO from the Ancient OBaRIT word ZaRO.
The cents sign is a a lower-case letter c pierced top to bottom by a forward slash or a vertical line. Etymologically, the word cent derives from the Latin word "centum" meaning hundred.
The pilcrow sign "¶" is a letter C, for capitulum, "chapter" in Latin with two vertical lines next to it: that originally went through it, like th slash or line goes through the letter c in the cents sign. These vertical lines may have come from the longest two lines in the Ancient OBaRIT tent wall letter named CHaTS for the [ch] as in Scottish "loch" sound. CHaTS is equivalent to the Modern Jewish Hebrew letter named "het", and its transliteral equivalent in English is H. The letter "h" in the English word "chapter" is likely where the two vertical lines in the pilcrow symbol are from.
The ampersand sign "&" is a ligature (letter made of two letters conjoined) of the letters in et (E and T) , Latin for "and". The ampersand can be traced back to the first century A.D. and the Old Roman cursive.
The euro sign "€" was inspired by the Greek epsilon (Є) since the European Commission believes that Greece is the cradle of European civilization. The Greek letter epsilon and the English letter E both evolved out of the Ancient OBaRIT man with arms raised letter named EA [eh-ah]: as shown in the Evolution of the English Alphbet Chart.
The dollar sign is likely derived from a slash through the numeral eight, denoting pieces of eight: according to the Oxford English Dictionary before 1963. The sign is attested in business correspondence between the British, Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans in the 1770s, as referring to the Spanish-Mexican peso, known as "Spanish dollar" or "pieces of eight" in British North America where it was adopted as U.S. currency in 1785, together with the term "dollar" and the $ sign.
The pound sign "£" derives from capital "L", standing for libra, the basic Roman unit of weight, which is in turn derived from the Latin word for scales or a balance. The pound sign ("£" or "₤") is the symbol for the pound sterling—the currency of the United Kingdom (UK).
The tick (check mark) "✔" is virtually the same in shape as and evolved out of the Ancient OBaRIT shepherd's staff letter named LaM that means teach or taught. In ancient ISHaRaAL a tick placed on an answer (written on sand, slate, wood, leather or papyrus) indicated that a teacher had taught the student correctly on that concept. Today a tick (known as a check mark or check in American English) is a mark (✓, ✔, ☑, etc.) used to indicate the concept "yes", for example "yes; this has been verified" or, "yes; that is the correct answer".
The currency sign "¤" appears in the Linear A and Linear B (Greek) scripts, representing the number 1000. It resembles a 0 (zero) with four prongs sticking out. These prongs may represent the number of (four) significant figures in the number 1000. The currency sign (¤) is a character used to denote a currency, when the symbol for a particular currency is unavailable.
The question mark is thought to originate from the Latin quaestiō (that is, qvaestio), meaning "question", which was abbreviated during the Middle Ages to "Qo" represented by lower case q with a lower case o underneath.
KEY-CHART to Print Off
It is recommended that you print off this high resolution PDF of the key chartof the jpeg image below, to refer to when using the font. It tells you which keys on your keyboard produce which characters.
© 2012 Created by Jane E Lythgoe (nee Marchant).