Jesus Primarily Spoke Aramaic

Jesus is believed to have primarily spoken a Galilean accented dialect of Aramaic since Aramaic was the most commonly spoken language of Judea in the first century AD. He also seems to have understood some Greek since he talked with Romans who would have primarily spoken that language.  Also, it was a point of pride and honor for a Jewish man to stand up in the synagogue and read from the Hebrew scriptures,

Biblical Hebrew,and most modern representations of the language, has an abjad writing system rather than an alphabet as in English. Abjabs are writing systems in which there are only consonants with no written vowels. The word is a technical term named for the fist four letters of the Arabic abjad in their original order of sequence: alif, ba, jem, dal. The first four letters in the Hebrew abjad retain the original Semitic sequence: aleph, bet, gimel, dalet.

The first widely used abjad was ancient Phoenician. It was much easier to learn and to write than the Egyptian hieroglyphics (a pictographic writing system). The Phoenician sea merchants quickly adopted the writing system for their business records.

The modern "alphabets" of Greek, English, Spanish, Russian, and other similar languages represent both consonantal and vowel sounds using their glyphs (aka letters). Each glyph represents a different sound.

The English word "alphabet"is derived from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha and beta.

Nikkudot

The nikkudot (plural of nikkud) are vowel marks which the Masoretes placed into the Hebrew text of the Bible.  Before that time, the Hebrew text consisted entirely of consonants.  This occasionally created confusion between similar words and the Masoretes were attempting to alleviate the problem.

Modern Hebrew has returned to using only consonants in the written form of the language.  In the spoken form, vowel sounds occur between consonants, with very rare exceptions.

Below is “bereshith,” the first word of Genesis, written with and without its accompanying nikkudot.

בראשית    בְּרֵאשִׁית