First of all I would like you to look at this, figure out what it is (that shouldn't take long, I don't think) and then - and this is the important bit - read it out loud. This is not to find out if you can read, we know that; just do it anyway...
hmpty dmpty st n ' wll hmpty dmpty hd ' grt fll ll th kngs hrss nd ll th kngs mn cldnt stck hmpty tgthr gn t b r nt t b tht s th qstn whthr ts nblr n th mnd t sffr th slngs nd rrws f trgs frtn r t tk rms gnst ' s f trbls nd by ppsng nd thm nc pn ' tm thr wr thr brs dddy br mmmy br nd bby br...
Now of course what I have done here is to remove the letters a, e, i, o and u (but I have replaced the occurrences of the indefinite article a with an apostrophe to stop it disappearing altogether). One purpose of this was to give those of you who don't already know this from experience a glimpse of approximately how it feels to be reading a Biblical Hebrew consonantal text, as it appears in torah scrolls for example, and what all Hebrew (or Aramaic or Ugaritic or Arabic etc.) reading was like before the introduction of vowel signs.
