[This is a guest post by Adam Levine]
A friend noticed this plaque while attending a wedding in New England:
The Hebrew on the plaque, בךקכהץ זםגקל, is pure gibberish. Most notably, two final forms of letters (ך and ם) written in the middle of words. This led to an epic late-night Facebook discussion as a team of highly Hebrew-literate sleuths struggled to figure out the meaning of the phrase. All sorts of theories were considered: Was it an acronym for the names of the donors or some other phrase? Was it the result of a computer issue, such as a phonetic Hebrew keyboard (for English speakers) vs. the standard Hebrew keyboard? None of these theories seemed to add up.
An inquiry to the venue produced the following reply: "[NAME REDACTED] was responsible for this plaque. The hebrew translates to bestowing kindness unto others. Mystery solved! 
"
Several people then began to notice some similarities between the mystery phrase and גמילות חסדים, gemilut hasadim, which has the intended meaning. The numbers of letters in each word are the same (6 and 5), and the two קs in the gibberish are in the same positions as the two יs in the suggested phrase. Moreover, many of the letters in the gibberish are nearby in alphabetical order to the corresponding letters in the suggested phrase, but with some inconsistencies: ב and ג are one letter apart, while ך (the final form of כ) is two off from מ. However, the letters ק and י are nowhere near each other in the alphabet. It was suggested that the letter י (which in most printed fonts is written with a serif on top) could easily have been mistaken for a ר, which is indeed one letter after ק, but this still didn't answer the main question: How did this happen?
The solution comes from looking at the alphabet. Hebrew uses dots in certain letters to distinguish between stops and fricatives – e.g. בּ bet vs. ב vet. These dots are not usually written by native speakers who can infer them from context, but non-native speakers frequently think of בּ and ב as separate letters (particularly those who learned the alphabet from this song). If we write out one version of the alphabet with the dotted/undotted letters treated as separate, and another one with the pairs treated as one, we have the following:
Without
dotted letters |
With
dotted letters |
Line
numbers |
| א |
א |
1 |
| ב |
בּ |
2 |
| ג |
ב |
3 |
| ד |
ג |
4 |
| ה |
ד |
5 |
| ו |
ה |
6 |
| ז |
ו |
7 |
| ח |
ז |
8 |
| ט |
ח |
9 |
| י |
ט |
10 |
| כ |
י |
11 |
| ך |
כּ |
12 |
| ל |
כ |
13 |
| מ |
ך |
14 |
| ם |
ךּ |
15 |
| נ |
ל |
16 |
| ן |
מ |
17 |
| ס |
ם |
18 |
| ע |
נ |
19 |
| פ |
ן |
20 |
| ף |
ס |
21 |
| צ |
ע |
22 |
| ץ |
פּ |
23 |
| ק |
פ |
24 |
| ר |
ף |
25 |
| ש |
צ |
26 |
| ת |
ץ |
27 |
|
ק |
28 |
|
ר |
29 |
|
שׁ |
30 |
|
שׂ |
31 |
|
תּ |
32 |
|
ת |
33 |
Most of the pairs of letters then line up perfectly! Specifically, each letter of גמילות חסדים in the first column ends up in the same row as the corresponding letter of בךקכהץ זםגקל, as highlighted in yellow. However, there are a few exceptions, highlighted in red. One letter (the final ם) should match up with ךּ by this rule, but instead it became ל, which is only off by one row. However, the ק/י issue discussed above remained mysterious, and the suggestion of first replacing י by ר fails to solve it. This, it turns out, was a red herring. A much better answer is that י could also be easily mistaken for an apostrophe, which is used in modern Hebrew in conjunction with certain letters to denote various non-native phonemes. If we add the apostrophe as an additional letter of the alphabet right after ת, we see that it lines up perfectly with ק in line 28, as required.
But why? We decided it would be rude to press the venue too hard on this question, but there is one likely explanation. Many (human) printers use a system of numbers for writing Hebrew letters on invitations, cards, and presumably plaques. For instance, if a customer wanted to get the word גמילות, they would give the printer a sequence of numbers corresponding to the letters – e.g. 3, 14, 10, 12, 6, 27 using the first column of our chart, reading right to left. This is intended to avoid mixups, which are likely when neither the customer nor the printer know Hebrew well. In this case, it seems that the customer probably encrypted the phrase using the first column, and the printer decrypted the sequence of numbers using the second column, leading to the gibberish. The issue of ךּ vs. ל can then easily be explained as a transcription error, particularly since 15 and 16 look and sound quite similar.
Mystery solved!
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